And they don't take American Express

For those of you who aren't following the saga of my trip to Spain, after a long day of interviewing a sales rep and driving all around Valencia and parts south of Valencia, the rep dropped us off near the Cathedral in old part of Valencia because we had a few hours before our flight.

We were about to walk around and see things, when we realized it was actually a little later than we thought. Valencia, geographically, lines up west of London, but the time zone is an hour earlier. So the evenings seem to stretch out and late afternoon is still pretty bright and hot.

Realizing it was a pretty long walk and later than we thought, we decided to cab it back to the hotel. I went to the nearby bank to pull out some cash, because by now we had discovered that most places in Europe don't take American Express, the preferred mode of payment by my corporate expense reporting.

And that's when the trip got interesting. I put my card into the ATM (yes, labelled Cirrus) outside of the Casa Madrid bank, and it asked for an 8 digit PIN. Not having an 8 digit PIN, I cancelled the transaction. Only the ATM didn't and decided to keep my debit card as a souvenir. Twenty minutes later, having tried everything we could think of, including having a lovely german tourist call the Casa Madrid help line (because banks in Spain close at 13:30 pm--how is this country a major economic power??) to speak to them in Spanish, we gave up and went back to the hotel.

Now, Jayson years ago pointed out to me that events, most notably bad events, cluster in 3s. Superstition then tells me that once something bad happens, I should look for the other 2 things that are on the way.

First, the ATM next to the closed bank eats my card just as we're on the way to the airport and can't come back.

I'll call the second bad event "communications" and cluster all of it. Revathi's phone wouldn't call out to apparently any number in Spain or out of Spain and the battery on mine died, so we headed to the hotel so I could use my Cisco VOIP phone--and couldn't get connected to the internet in the hotel (and the english-speaking desk staff weren't there). At that point, we went to the airport, where I got on a public terminal and chatted Jayson on Googletalk for the Chase number. He gave me the number titled "From outside the US, call collect" only that number wouldn't take a collect call. When I charged the call to my credit card, it went into a phone queue, which started with "if you are within the US, please hang up and call 1 800...." which it repeated twice. That improved my mood a lot.

Then I got through to an operator, who wasn't authorized to access my debit card, so she transferred me to another number. Did I mention that the airport wasn't very air conditioned, and in addition to being really hot, it was also very humid? That helped really improve my mood even more. Nothing like being frustrated, hot and literally dripping in sweat. Finally I got an operator who COULD access my account, and she graciously canceled the card and set it up to send me a new one. To Spain, you ask? Hahahahahaha. No, to Boulder. They can't send you a new one to anywhere other than your house. And they don't have any branch offices in Europe. Citibank is looking really good to me now. Revathi and I were sitting waiting for the plane when she exclaimed "My God, things actually work better in India!"

We arrived in Palma, and took a cab to our hotel. And this is three. They informed us that we "canceled" the second reservation. I must say, it's a good thing I have a good sense of humor, because by now it was 11:30 pm, and I think I was beyond getting too upset. Thankfully, they had another room available. I got in, got internet from my room instead of having to go to the lounge (one small victory!), and called American Express.

Up until now, I had been feeling like we were in a Visa ad--it's everywhere you want to pay for something. But AmEx at least used to be the travel people. I happen to have 2 Amex cards--my corporate card and one for Costco. My Costco card is authorized for cash, but I didn't know the PIN. The lovely AmEx people in Greensboro NC (love you Justin, smoooooch!) set me up with an emergency one time PIN and the address for an AmEx office in Sheffield, one of our next locations on this trip. But they told me that I had to take the money out as "from checking" not fast cash. That's not an option at any of the 20+ ATMs I went to in my walking tour of Palma last night. And the machines wouldn't dispense cash. So finally I thought (thanks to Dipock for the suggestion) that I would head to a bank this morning and buy American Express Traveler's Checks with my, um, American Express card.

But guess what? Even though they all had hours for Saturday posted on their doors, no bank was open. I finally went to the post office and asked a lovely woman there if she knew of a bank that was open on Saturday. She looked online, then said in the sweetest broken English, "um, eh, in Espaina, in de summer, de banks? She are not open."

Wheeeeee!

Undaunted, I went on another walking tour of banks in Palma, covering a wider net, until I found a Citibank. I could make this one of the tourist attractions for the area at this point. Score! I thought. Nope, no dice. But the bank next door had an ATM that took my card, and then seemed to ponder my request before suddenly making whirring noise, and spitting out first a receipt and then MONEY! I was nearly giddy when I heard the sound of bills being mechanically shuffled.

So here I am, getting ready to head out to Manchester tomorrow. It's been hot, humid, sweaty, but also productive and interesting. Palma is cool and we did tour the Cathedral today so it wasn't all bad. I've had gazpacho every day at least once. Tomorrow we're flying out to Manchester where the temperature is supposed to peak at 66 and be raining. Bring it on!


Spain, as the Tapelia hand wipe says, I'm ready to "Como Ponchio Pilatos yo..."

(for more photos, but not all captioned yet--sorry Libby--see http://picasaweb.google.com/erikanollwebb/ValenciaAndPalmaPersonal?authkey=Gv1sRgCM3r3YDa8qb8Cw&feat=directlink or http://picasaweb.google.com/erikanollwebb/PalmaSaturday?authkey=Gv1sRgCLjj2MCH3I7gxwE&feat=directlink)

Sights in Valencia

Interesting buildings in the old section of the city.


I thought this would be like tonic water or bitter lemon. It was quite a bit more medicinal than that. After a while though, in the 35 deg heat, it seemed pretty refreshing.


More of the old city, not really sure what it was.


Again, signs--pretty much the same as in Germany, but less emphatic somehow.


Interesting statue.


Looking up what exactly we just ordered for lunch....

We ordered a traditional salt cod dish--we got the above--basically potato chips with prosciutto and a fried egg--and that was just pointing at the menu!


Gazpacho--fabulous on a very hot humid afternoon!

And then there were the less attractive city sights, reminding me what you get with hot, humid port cities...

\
Swear they were the size of kittens!

Product Endorsement

Ok, just to vent a bit. Revathi and I had a car in Heidelberg. A very small car called a Panda. I got the Hertz Never Lost system with the car. Hertz needs to consider rebranding this to Hertz Always Lost or at least be a bit explicit that the system might have just a few bugs. I will grant that odd 1000 year old European cities could cause just about any system some difficulties but when the darn thing would tell us to turn left and we did, it would promptly announce that it was "recalculating". We were screaming at the thing last night "WE DID!" I think we offended it, so today it got even. We had to drive from Heidelberg to Frankfurt Hahn airport. In spite of the name, Frankfurt Hahn is really nowhere near Frankfurt. It would be like renaming the Denver International Airport something like Chicago DIA. Oh, you might think it's close, but it's not.

On the way, the system announced on the autobahn that we were to take the next exit--as in, the one that we were currently zipping past at 120 kmh. Thanks Hertz! Then it decided to recalculate. Apparently, it waited to tell us about the exit we were flying past when there was no way to take any corrective action for about 25 miles. Nice. So we were re-routed through Worms. Despite the seriously unfortunate name in English, Worms was a pretty interesting place to drive into. And back out of. And back into. Thanks Hertz! It was great the way you said turn left and then routed us back across the bridge only to turn around and enter the city again. On the upside, we did get to take another shot of the bridge.

Frankfurt Hahn was a very strange airport and Ryan Air was a definite loser of an airline. We dropped the car and then had to walk to the terminal. No shuttle. In the rain. Uphill. The surrealness of it did add to the general strangeness of the day. We got in and discovered a massive crush of people (apparentally all their flights leave at the same time) and after waiting a surreal amount of time in line, we discovered that they have a maximum luggage weight of 15 kg (33lbs). Ouch. And of course, since we were flying internationally and for work, we had tons of extra stuff with us (I have 2 computers with me, for example). I thought fine, we'll pay for the extra weight, there's nothing we can do. And discovered that the extra weight was charged at an outlandish 15 Eur per kg! My extra 5 kg thus rang up for another 75 Eur!

And to make matters worse, you can't pay the additional baggage fee at the counter, you have to leave the line and go to the ticket counter, pay there and then go back through the crush of people to get your boarding pass. After all that, we had to go through security, which like other odd regional airports, was insanely slow.

But after all that, we've made it to Valencia. We're in Spain until Sunday (Valencia, then Palma de Mallorca) when we fly to Manchester and parts north...

Well-used tools

Years ago, we visited a small island museum that included tools going back to the earliest settlers. My father commented to the museum attendant that some of the tools looked nearly brand new, while others looked sort of like you'd expect a 300 year old hammer to look. He asked the attendant why they thought that was. "Someone took better care of their tools." Down Easteners aren't known much for small talk.

These are some of the tools I saw at the Schloss (castle) today. They had an exhibit of Apotheke (apothecary) history.

More signs

I love signs in other countries. This one was at an intersection that was pretty busy. "Be an example, stay when it's red, go when it's green". Not sure why the kid is lifelike and the adult is represented by a stoney red figure.


Apparently this needs no translation.


I love that some of these "icons" leave little to the imagination. NO PLAYING SOCCER! NO JUMPING DOGS! NO DOGS TAKING A DUMP! then for inexplicable reasons, the one icon that I think would be sort of universal is missing and instead they use the words "THIS PARK IS SMOKE FREE".

The signs of progress. The older "walking guy" sign is a figure with a fedora. The new one is a slimmer figure that appears to be wearing a belt (click on the picture for a bigger view).

Handschuhsheim

I'm in a neighborhood that translates something like Home of the Gloves. I'm guessing it's probably one of those places that was a home of glove makers very early on, and the name stuck. There are gloves in many places around the town. Here are some, plus a view onto the old Tiefburg.

Abendessen

Yummm.

I'm only sort of sure what it was --but it was tasty.

Erika

Fruestueck

Not much of a breakfast person, I thought this was a lovely little meal of heavily seeded bread and butter with coffee.

In Heidelburg

I have to say, on the grand scheme of things, I'm thinking I have done ok so far. I managed to land in Frankfurt about 7 am and both collect my bag and rent a car with a GPS system and then figure out where a shopping district in Frankfurt would be, esse Fruestueck, kauf' ein Haarkurler und finde ein TMobile zu eine SIM karte kaufen. Not too bad for having just arrived in the country still jetlagged. The worst part was that I arrived in the shopping area too early to do all of that, so I had to just wander around a little bit, remember that I should keep track of where I left the car, wander back and then once having noted some landmarks, wander some more until the stores opened.

I started out flying to Charlotte. I've never flown through there, and while I'm not all that wow'd by US Airways (older cramped planes), the Charlotte Airport is quite nice. In a nod to their Southern location, they have rocking chairs out in the main terminal area. Of course though, it's mostly business travelers in them, and there were plugs at regular intervals (bless their hearts for thinkin' of that!) .

As is usually the case, I realized fairly quickly that I had forgotten something. In this case, I forgot a curling iron. This is one of those things that might be a blessing. About 2 years ago Anne discovered that a mere power transformer is not always what you need for some things and started a small fire in Laura's temporary London apartment with some hair appliances. Whoops. Now, certain types of shopping in other countries is always fun for me. The first time I was in India, it took several hours and multiple stores to find a small travel alarm clock (see ErikaInIndia if you didn't read that before). It just goes to show that while some things maya be universal, others are not. In this case, my first challenge was finding the word for curling iron in my German Dictionary--the closest I could get was Lockenwickler, which was really curler--which could be something that works without electricity. The second challenge was in decoding what kind of store would carry such product.

In the US, I'm sure you good come up with 5 places that might have one--drugstore being the top of the list, then stores like Target and going down to maybe discount store, grocery store or department store. Fairly diverse list, but not hard to generate. In other countries, the mental model of certain types of shopping is different. Die Apotheke had hair ties, barrettes, shampoo and such, but no hair dryers or curling irons. The more "health and beauty" store had curlers, bobby pins and other hair ornamentation, but not curling irons. Finally I went to the department store and looked in the section sort of like a drugstore area but they didn't have it either. At that point, I was willing to go ahead and fumble through in german to ask, and was cheerfully told that they were on 4, with "elektronische". I get it, it plugs in, but it's not something I expect to look for with coffeemakers and vacuum cleaners.

That lead to my second problem. I am an exchange rate 'tard. There's just no good way to put it. In Mexico, where the exchange rate is pretty consistently 10 pesos to the dollar, I'm never sure if I just spent 5 cents on hot sauce or 5 dollars. I can remember nearly ever conference id in the department and phone numbers for virtually anything that was ever important to me, but I cannot manipulate those numbers in my head. So there I am, looking at curling irons and trying to figure out if they are about what I'd expect to pay for a curling iron, or about $80-100 each. I have to start with some exchange rate landmarks for any trip and use those to get my bearings for the rest of the trip and I hadn't done that yet. I found one, it should be ok, and I'm pretty sure it didn't endanger the likelihood that the girls will go to college. I even wrote in my little travel log that $10 = 7 Euro and 10 Euro = $14 for future reference. I know, like I said, if you are one of those people who can do that in your head, writing it both ways seems silly. I am NOT one of those people, so it helps me to write it down. Years ago, trying to figure out a tip, my dear mother in law said to me "It's just 10 % and 5%". I turned and said "I know what it MEANS, I just can't do that in my head!".

Signs... I always like them, so I always take pictures of them. The X's on the pets struck me as funny.


This looked sort of like the pose Lauren Bacall was in on the top of the piano shot.


My little car... It's not a smart car, but it's pretty darn close.



The trunk was exactly the size of my two bags.

Well, my body is informing me that I have now been up for close to 24 hours (except some restless sleep on the plane) so I'm going to chance it and get a little lie down before adding the next part.

Tschuss!

Here we go again!

Ok, so once again, I'm hitting the road--this time for 2 weeks doing user research in Europe with one of the Usability Engineers on my team, Revathi Nathaniel. We're going out to study how Pharmaceutical reps do their jobs in different countries in Europe in order to take that information and create more usable software that does what they need it to do and works the way they think about their work. I'll be leaving July 10 and we'll be heading out to 3 countries, Germany, Spain and England.

Logistics for this trip were challenging. So here's a little pictorial of where we'll be.

I'll land in Frankfurt, but the first visit will be in Heidelburg. I'll get there there weekend before and have a day to recover from my jetlag. After Heidelburg, we're flying to Spain.





We'll spend 2 days in Valencia before flying to the Spanish Island of Palma de Mallorca to interview another Pharma sales rep there.


We'll be there until Sunday when we have to fly to Manchester England.


We'll be in Manchester area for a day or so, consolidating our notes and Revathi may stop by Lancaster University, where she's entering a grad program in the fall. Then we head out to Sheffield. We'll spend a day in Sheffield before heading down to Essex to meet another sales rep.




We'll drive down from Sheffield to Essex and stay a day in Essex before catching an afternoon flight out.


And finally, we'll head to our last visit, in Germany. We'll be going to a small town called Montabaur.

After all of that, it'll be time to head back to the US on July 24. I ended up having to fly back not to Denver, but straight to St Louis, since we were going to fly out for a few days in Mt Vernon for Roger's 90th birthday on July 26!

I'll post more to this site as we go, just to keep everyone up to date on our trip!