Ciao Milan, Hola Barcelona!

Well our time in Italy is at an end, we fly out this afternoon, so I thought I'd do one last posty bit before we left. Notepad is a wonderful thing, here is something I prepared earlier...

I thought it was high time I added another post to the blog, our wifi at the hotel has been uncooperative of late, but I thought I would give it a go as we've had a busy few days. And just to make you even more jelous, I'm typing this to the beautiful sound of rain - actual rain, not pansy assed spitting - rain!! But I digress.

Monday was the start of the presentations of papers and both Asha and I sat in on the 'Public Libraries and Metropolitan Libraries: Framing the future for a new agenda for Public Libraries.' It was a great start to the week, with some really interesting ideas from Queens Public Library in New York to Copenhagen Public Library in Denmark.*

Next up was the 'Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning' with more fantastic speakers, beginning with Loida Garcia-Febo, from Queens. Asha and I follow Loida on twitter, so it's great to be able to put a face to the name. Vanessa Warren from UTAS also presented a paper, so it was great to see the 'skippys' being represented, (we spent the week hearing "there's lots of you this year"). I say watch out - we're planning to take over the world, one unsuspecting European at a time. Then it was time to get better aquainted with the various exhibitors.

Tuesday was more of the same, with another walk around the booths and a fantastic @ your library presentation from 'Michael Dowling from the ALA, with some help from George from the recently formed Greek Library Association. It's great to see libraries so enthused by the @ your library campaign. We also met up with another lady we follow on twitter, it was great to have the oppertunity to do that. We've also been invited to come visit the Library of Congress in D.C., by a lady that was staying in the same hotel. Asha had a gallery tour in the arvo and I disovered the joys of international Document Delivery!

Later Tuesday night it was on to more important things - Asha's 30th Birthday! We had the social evening, which wasn't quite what we expected and sadly the food left a lot to be desired, but the coffee was good, although we were discouraged by our waiter against having espresso, as it's 'too strong' for so late a night, (I think they are used to Aussies/UK/USA visitors having cuppacinos and lots of milk so they don't think we can handle it) - but Asha & I are now enjoying the less milky side of coffee. We had the chance to head in Duomo and see it at night, it had a completely different atmosphere. We were able to see two pages from a book of drawings from Leonardo Da Vinci and more importantly - Julie we came nose to glass with Prada and Louis Vuitton - photos to follow. Then it was into the gallery to view some Monet. It was a great night for it, a bit cooler than it has been.

On Wednesday we had the visit to the Children's Library of Rozzano, it's a fantastic facility, housed in a converted water mill. They also have a separate adult library, this was converted from a barn.

The lovely people at Rozzano provided us with morning tea, lots of tasty pastries and very strong coffee as Wombat found out.

and here's Wombat with some new friends he made, librarians from South Africa.

Here's Miki and Wombat, Miki is from Japan and was very kind and gave us a Japanese manga, Wombat picked Bleach, which I personally think was an awesome choice!

Yesterday we had a sleep in then ventured into the city to do some sightseeing at the Storza Castle, we met some lovely Italian boys and wombat had a great time posing for photos. I am going to leave it here as my eye's are falling out of my head! I'll add the rest of the photo's in the next few days.

Cya in Barcelona.

C.