CFSIC Conference, Alicante, September 2006

Wednesday 21 September 2006. Around three o'clock in the afternoon I'm at Manchester Aiport in a gi-i-inormous queue waiting for a flight out to sunny Spain to attend and put in my odd Euro's worth at the Critical Success Factors in Institutional Change conference. Read the whole article before sneering at how lucky I was or how taxpayers' money was wasted. In fact the venue (Alicante University) had hosted the event either for free or at minimal cost and the cost of cheap flights to Spain was a heck of a lot less than a return fare to London from just about anywhere in the UK.

I was sandwiched between Deb's Divas (pink wigs and lots of pink satin) and Michelle's Minxes (pink gins and lots of noise). By the time the flight actually took off I was looking round the plane trying to spot anyone else who was sober...

We landed around seven o'clock and by the time I had managed to get a taxi and arrived at the hotel it was 8:00pm-ish and dark. Met up with Gill and Phil and we had a drink in the bar whilst my mind slowly cleared the worst scenes from the flight and airports including the aghast expressions on the faces of airport staff and security as various fancy dress stags and hens, of all ages and sizes staggered through arrivals.

I was staying at the Hotel Amerigo with Gill, my boss and her husband Phil. We went out to eat at this pizza place. Neither Gill nor Phil eat meat and none of us were quite sure of the Spanish for "vegetarian" but on the basis of add an "o" to everything, "vegetariano" worked quite well! Once we had convinced the Spanish waiters that chicken was not a vegetable, that is...

Good and humble employee that I am, I reluctantly agreed to Gill's request that we had to have an ice cream. I gawped at the size of it when it came and was still in shock when she took this photo... I'm sure I remember she only ate a couple of mouthfuls whilst saying "Come on - you can't leave all that..." I imagine she'll put me right at some point...! Anyway, we had a wander about for a while - she and Phil led the wandering whilst I staggered behind, holding my stomach, making strange whimpering noises... Around 11:00pm we came across a table full of familiar faces at an outdoor table at a restaurant. The JISC contingent.

We resisted the temptation to join them for another meal and by midnight for some inexplicable reason we were at the top of our hotel where the swimming pool was located, for the purpose of looking at the view. Street level is so far down you can only just see the glow of lights at the bottom of the photo because I didn't want to miss the castle, the 16th-century Castillo de Santa Barbara, at the top of the 166 metre cliff.

The following morning we were up bright and early and waiting for a bus to take us to the university. This quarter-hour wait was the only chance I got of seeing Alicante in daylight and sadly the beach was not in sight. The conference was interesting, I chirruped my views a couple of times and by 3:15pm was back in a taxi being driven though what appeared to be a sea-view-free scrubland desert back to the airport for a flight back to Manchester.

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