I definitely need to get better at posting while on the road. Sorry for the long lapse and I hope it won’t take so long ever again.

Will, Kat and I arrived in Barcelona around 11AM on Tuesday and decided to go to Valencia for 2 days since we’d be spending so much time in Barcelona during and after the tournament. I originally had planned to play in a smaller tournament on Wednesday but I decided it would be more fun to check out another city and I’d also be able to adjust to the time change better. We had a great time in Valencia and I don’t regret going at all. We found a very basic place to stay, San Jose hostel. It was pretty ghetto but pretty cheap so I was fine with it. The heart of the city is really old and it reminds me of a lot of great European cities with amazing architecture and cool little mazes of roads that make the cities really fun to explore. One word to the wise: If you ever travel with Will, do NOT let him navigate. North is South, East is West and we always wound up at the train station no matter where we wanted to go. We had some really bad meals at some really cheap restaurants and drank quite a bit of beer. Two places that I highly recommend if you ever go to Valencia: Bar Pilar, great atmosphere, delicious mussels and relatively inexpensive, and Radio City. It sounds pretty cheesy but Radio City was the coolest club we could find. There were more locals here than any other place we could find and the dance floor was pretty crowded. On Wednesday night we cut a mean American rug until it closed around 4 AM.

Thursday we caught the train back to Barcelona. The round trip ended up being around 60 Euros, pretty expensive compared to the travel I did in Eastern Europe but I guess it’s to be expected in Spain. We checked in at the Barcelona Princess around 6 PM and left the memories of the San Jose Hostel far behind. This hotel actually has a door on the shower and a window that looks out over the city instead of a brick wall. I went to the casino last night for a bit and hung out with the PokerStars people who have been kind enough to sponsor me in this tournament. I met some really cool people and got my first taste of the Barcelona nightlife. Will and Kat stayed out until about 4 AM again but I came back early to make sure I would be well rested today. I’m really excited for the tournament and let’s hope I get lucky.

Here are some good places to receive updates:

http://www.pokerstarsblog.com/barcelona.html
http://taopoker.blogspot.com/

The second page is run by a guy named Pauly and he’s a really great writer. I met him last night but I’ve been reading his blog for a few months now. He’s covering the event for Poker Player newspaper and I think he’ll have updates throughout the day. Of course I’ll try to post as much as I can. Let’s hope I don’t have any time for posting because I’m busy playing all night. It’s about an hour 'til gametime so I'm going to head over to the Casino. Talk to you soon.