A week in Barcelona (1)

This week I’m in Barcelona for the ISPOR European conference. The conference is usually big, but my first impression is that this year is actually huge! The plenary session is in the Auditori of the Conference Center, which again is a massive (and rather nice!) room — it kind of feels like being at the Oscars, with music interludes to accompany every new speaker to the podium. A bit weird, but certainly impressive.

While it’s surely going to be a rather pleasant week, it’s also going to be busy as well — I had my first meeting at 7.30am (which is way earlier than I would have in a normal week). And it was a rather weird experience to ride the (again, quite nice and clean) Barcelona’s tube at 7am, with virtually nobody around. I am also here to present two workshops and I’ll post more on these later.

Hopefully my binge-watching of Spanish and Catalan shows will pay off in the next few days — I did manage to have a conversation with the taxi driver (who wouldn’t “hablar el Ingles”) relatively successfully, so the signs are looking good…