Preparing for ICANN Lisbon

While I was at DomainFest in LA I got to meet a lot of interesting people in the domain / hosting / internet / online business, so going to ICANN Lisbon was a natural followup. Unfortunately I've been rather busy over the last few weeks, though that's probably a good complaint to have as well :) In any case I only got round to booking my flights this evening. Trying to find reasonably priced flights to Lisbon isn't as easy as it should be - thank God for sites like Expedia.it (the English version kept on giving me pricing in dollars, so I opted for the Italian version) and Sky Scanner! So my flights are booked and now all I have to do is find a hotel. I've ended up taking quite a circuitous route, flying Dublin - Madrid - Lisbon (it could have been worse if I'd ended up with Lufthansa!), so depending on how the times work out I may even get to pop into Madrid for a couple of hours. I haven't been to Lisbon for about 10 years. I was there twice in the 90's with my girlfriend at the time. We were poverty-stricken students. We were in love. It was romantic. Though the hotels were far from it! I swore the last time I was there that if I ever went back I would stay in a semi-decent hotel, though I never imagined it would take me practically ten years to get back there!