The day has arrived!
After the wait of all these weeks, since I received the invitations for the events and did the campaign to ask for support, the day came to pack our bags and get ready to go back to Spain, as in 2023, this time not to attend a Zcash event of our own, as was the Zcon4, but to represent Zcash, the Spanish speaking community, and Venezuela.
What an honor and what a commitment!
But the truth is that we are already in Barcelona, to attend day 1 of the European Blockchain Conference, with lots of encouragement, optimism and registered for the side events, where there will be a lot of networking.
A brief and dark parenthesis: getting out of Venezuela
I don't want to distract you too much, dear reader, with the negative things I had to go through to be able to leave Venezuela, but I think it is important to mention it, so that the world knows.
It is no secret to anyone the dictatorship that is living in Venezuela, disguised as legality. And in these months, after the electoral fraud in which the government, after losing the elections, did not recognize them and tortured and imprisoned all those who protested against the fraud, a crusade began, a media war against all the countries that have spoken out against the fraud, among many of them, Spain.
The truth is that officials of the dictatorship had threatened to suspend all flights to Spain just one week before our trip. In addition, we ran the constant risk of having our passports cancelled, just because, that's Venezuela.
Our flight was leaving for Spain at 9 PM on 9/22, and in any normal country in the world it is normal to arrive 2 hours before the flight. Well no, in Venezuela nothing is like in the rest of the world.
We had to arrive 9 hours before the flight time to be able to check in, because in the international airport there is not enough staff, no air conditioning, no water, and the electricity is very limited. It was a real torture and constant fear to stay 9 hours in that giant sauna.
But we made it! We managed to board the plane and leave for Madrid.
The flight went smoothly. We arrived in Madrid at the scheduled time, and made a stopover in Barcelona.
How nice and strange it feels to be in a free place, free of fear, censorship and control. Although nowadays there is no country in the world that is totally free and where our privacy and personal safety is not under surveillance by the authorities, but there are levels, and my country's is one of the lowest in that sense.
So we are already in Barcelona, Spain, with our batteries recharged, eager to network and talk about Zcash with everyone.
We discovered that there is a list of side events, with many complementary activities! So we will be looking for the opportunity to organize our own informal event to perhaps reach out to privacy enthusiasts, ZK proof technology enthusiasts, or privacy cryptocurrency enthusiasts. I'll be telling you about it.
Don't forget that we will be sharing everything we see on the event days on our personal social networks:
Zcast, on Twitter and YouTube.
For now, I'll say goodbye, tomorrow begins!