Kevin and I arrived in Barcelona by train late last night. We barely had time to grab some food before needing to get to bed. The one things we did register is that Barcelona is a Food Town. We are going to eat well here.

That was borne out in spades by the hotel breakfast which was magnificent.

We managed to get to the convention center and get registered in time for the Opening Ceremonies that were the usual round of speeches, enlivened by a brilliant chap who noted down everything said (presumably in shorthand given how fast he was going) and then translated each speech into whichever two of Spanish, Catalan and English had not been used by the speaker. Kevin and I were well impressed.

My one panel of the convention was immediately after Opening Ceremonies. It seemed to go well. Certainly some people came up to me afterwards and said they enjoyed it. More on that in a separate post.

Then it was on to a lunch meeting with a new academic pal (Hola Agnès!) to chat about trans women in Mesopotamia and a possible academic conference here in February. Kevin and I also got a short tour of Barcelona University which is absolutely gorgeous in places (the old bits, obviously).

Next up was the Johanna Sinisalo Guest of Honor interview, in which I had to ask a question because everyone else in the audience was too shy. I encouraged her to have a bit of a feminist rant.

Kevin and I then headed back to the hotel for a meeting for small presses. We ended up being quite late due to some banking adventures that Kevin has detailed on his LiveJournal. Having got that sorted, we went and chatted about small press publishing. There are some really great little companies operating in Europe. I’ll try to find out more about some of them.

The same room was used later for the ESFS Business Meeting. I had allowed Saija Kyllönen to persuade me to come along and volunteer to be a UK delegate. Most of UK fandom looks down its nose at Eurocon, and after recent events you probably understand this much better. Other countries send official delegations. The UK delegates end up being whoever is in the room at the time. In this case it was Martin Hoare and myself, meaning that it was actually a Welsh delegation. The downside was that I was stuck there for two hours, missing the Evil Females panel, and the Gender and Post-Humanism panel, and watching Kevin try not to explode over the lack of formal parliamentary procedure.

The meeting went fairly smoothly compared to previous Eurocons I have seen. There was a minor constitutional crisis caused when the Russian delegation proposed an Israeli magazine (written in Russian) and Cheeky Frawg Books (who are of course American) for awards. This was swiftly dealt with by Gareth Kavanagh who pointed out that what the Russians had done was only illegal under the new award rules that we had just adopted, whereas their nominations had been made a month ago under the old rules which did not specify that nominees had to be European.

Personally I am delighted for Ann & Jeff VanderMeer who have done an enormous amount to promote European SF.

The full list of award nominees is available here. I have no idea who made the UK nominations. The voting takes place tomorrow, and as a delegate I apparently have a vote.

Bridget Wilkinson is retiring after 25 years as ESFS Awards Administrator. We gave her a well-deserved round of applause.

The meeting also included news of forthcoming Eurocon bids. Next year’s convention is already seated and will be in Dortmund. The French have a bid for 2018 for the city of Amiens, where Jules Verne spent most of his working life. They are unopposed and seem set to be officially elected tomorrow.

Belfast is bidding for 2019, and plan to hold their convention the week after the proposed Dublin Worldcon. There is also a bid for Rijeka in Croatia for 2020. That’s a very nice city which I visited on my last Croatian trip. Rijeka was where one Fiorello La Guardia worked as US Consul prior to WWI. It is also the place where I discovered a Tyrolean cocktail called The Hugo. Sadly the Eurocon may be out of Hugo season as it is planned for early October.

We had dinner at a tapas bar with some lovely Czech fans, who I may be writing more about later. And now I am busy trying to keep you updated before hitting the hotel bar.