I’ve come to think that once the infrastructure is up and running, providing broadband via either DSL or 3G costs nearly zero to the provider (hopefully someone will correct me if I’m wrong). In the UK, O2 gives one month of “unlimited” Internet access to prepaid mobile users every time they refill with at least £10. In Italy, despite the availability of sensible prepaid data plans, the latest trend is to trick customers into paying for time-based service, billed in 15-minute chunks (a crime all in itself), and make them believe it’s a good deal. In a country where the infrastructure is in place, but where service is often poor due to the presence of many mountains and such, one can see how this is much less than ideal.

Let’s not even start with the situation in the United States, where AT&T has decreed that iPhone users with prepaid plans (mostly foreigners in the country for possibly short times) are not even entitled to data service.

There is no use trying to read the time on the clock of our hotel room in València. It has a face, yes. It also has what I can only assume is a stuffed cuckoo—a fake one, I’d say—hanging from it. But it has no hands. Yes, our hotel, a couple of blocks from the impressive City of Arts and Sciences, is one with thematic rooms that walk the fine line between humor and Kitsch—and often enough step way beyond that line.

The drive from Barcelona—better, from Viladecans, near the airport, where we slept after my arrival—took us to Sitges for a late breakfast, which in reality was a lunch made of small octopodes, and, later on, to Sagunt, where I was forced to show off my driving skills thanks to some awfully steep, narrow, winding town streets.

There is no safe haven for the grammar freak. On Facebook there are some “fan pages” with names like “Knowing the Difference Between There, Their, & They’re” or “Knowing the Difference Between You’re and Your” (set up by the same people, I assume), of which I did become a fan, just for fun. It’s like becoming a fan of “‘Become a fan’”: you don’t really expect anything useful out of it except a bit of occasional humor.

(I’ll leave out of this the fact that the creators of such pages should have created groups instead, and are now being investigated by Facebook because of said pages’ huge success in number of fans. Someone should create a page—well, a group—called “Knowing the Difference Between a Page and a Group on Facebook.”)

Here I was, a few minutes ago, overfed after a delicious dinner with friends in my birth town—for once not plagued by industrial smells, as the winds were blowing away from the city and into the adjacent countryside—and pondering over all the different scenarios that would present themselves to me in the new day.