I arrived in Barcelona safely yesterday with only one minor mishap along the way. I bumped into Mark Vos waiting for my connection in London and reintroduced myself as we'd met in Vegas at dinner one night through Tony (Bond18). He had been traveling for 2 days already at this point after one of his connections left 16 hours late in Beijing, and was on stand-by for my flight, which he eventually got on. I managed to sleep for an hour on that flight which was the only sleep I got in a 36 hour period or so. Anyways upon arriving in Barcelona Mark and I were both exhuasted and chatting a bit and not really paying attention to where we had to go. We ended up going down into baggage claim in terminal A instead of B. I'm not sure how we were supposed to know we had to change terminals as we clearly arrived in terminal A, and the doors were right there in front of us with a sign saying baggage claim so went in. I'm sure it was our own fault somehow as we were sort of out of it but it also seems like a kind of crappy way to have the airport set up. Eventually we realized our bags weren't there and found out we had to change terminals.
Of course now we had to go back through security without an outgoing boarding pass which didn't seem like it would go well. On top of that Mark had lost his stub from the flight we arrived on. Fortunately I guess the whole going to the wrong terminal for baggage thing is pretty common there (not surprisingly) as despite the language barrier the security guy immediately knew what we were talking about. We also saw several other people from our flight doing the same thing as us so we didn't feel like such idiots anymore. Anyways Mark managed to eventually talk the guy into letting him through despite not having his boarding pass. Of course by the time we finally got to the right baggage claim area our bags had been taken off the carousel and we had to go to a back room where luckily my bags turned up, but Mark's did not. I guess if his luck ever evens out on this trip there's a good chance you'll see him at the final table.
So finally I got in a cab and managed to communicate where I had to go (it took pen and paper) and got to the hotel. Once I got to the hotel things started going more smoothly, though I had to call for a voltage converter and the wireless doesn't get a signal in my room, so I then had to call for an ethernet cord. The room and hotel in general is very nice though, I'll probably post some pics at some point. Anyways I quickly found Jimmy aka gobbboboy online and we decided to walk over to the casino and register before the rush tomorrow. We checked out the area where the tournament will be played and it actually looks pretty good. The tables are spread out around the room so there's lots of space. We then went back to the hotel and hung out for a bit before meeting up with a bunch of other online players and heading over to the Stars welcome party.
For a guy running on one hour sleep I had a surprising amount of energy still. I drank a bunch of free cocktails and ate a lot of appetizers as I hadn't eaten much that day yet either. The party was a lot of fun hanging out with all the online guys I hadn't seen in a while and meeting some new people. I'm probably pretty lucky I ended up calling it an early night around 12 though.
So I play Day 1A of the EPT event today, but we don't start until 5pm local time which I guess is pretty sweet. Despite having gotten no sleep on the trip I still only slept for 5 hours and I haven't been able to get back to sleep yet, hence this blog post. I'm gonna go try to get some rest now so I can own this tournament.
Mike
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