I'm in Valencia, Spain, for a few days for a conference on Artificial Intelligence and just arrived this morning. Having some time to kill, I decided to go for a walk in the city (since my hotel is actually a few miles from the city centre, closer to the beach) and took the mini-bus (which the hotel so kindly provides to its guests free of charge) to the city centre directly to the main train station, Valencia Nord.

With no knowledge of the city at all, I decided to go inside the main train station in order to look for a tourism office to, at least, get a map that would allow me to easily stroll around. Since the station is huge and I didn't actually know if there was a tourism office there, I had to wander around a little bit looking for one.

Apparently, this is not the kind of behaviour that is tolerated around here because, just 4 or 5 minutes after I entered the station, I was suddenly approached by a couple of undercover policemen that very subtly showed me their badges and persuaded me to join them to a less conspicuous area of the station (since I was more or less in the middle of the main hall) to ask me a few questions.

Needless to say, at this point my balls were the size of sesame seeds mainly because my thriller-fuelled stupid brain started to imagine that I would end up in a secret government prison being tortured (permitted under some devious terrorist act law of some sort) to provide answers about some secret terrorist cell, just because they confused me with some terrorist guy.

Luckily, my brain was wrong and the policemen were very polite and went on with the "routine questioning" quite efficiently. First, they asked for some identification, which I provided, and took some notes, which one of the officers used to contact a central service of some sort. In the meantime, the other officer was asking me routine questions, always in spanish.

He started by asking where I was from since it became quite evident by brilliant and fluent "castellaño" that I wasn't spanish at all. Then he asked what did I do for a living. At this point, I was afraid that my answer that I actually develop intelligent software entities for a living, would not help me get on the policemen's good side, so I decided to simply say that I was in Valencia for a conference that "involves computers". He did give me that suspicious look and decided to dig in deeper and asked me exactly what the conference was about. That's when I decided to give him the usual answer that always work on these situations: intelligent robots. Surprisingly enough, he said: "Oh, that kind of technology from the future, that we see in movies? Cool!". Great, I was home safe…

But my brain was still not convinced about the whole thing and I still decided that I owed it to myself to try to find out why the hell was I being questioned by undercover cops. Just in case, they were in fact criminals trying to kidnap me or something, you know… the usual (I really should stop seeing so many action movies). So I started asking some questions and at this point I was quite amazed with the fact that I was maintaing a conversation in spanish for about 5 minutes and the guy was actually understanding what I was saying. I asked why did they approach me and why was the other men calling someone.

The explanation was simple: that train station is the main connection of Valencia to the remaining cities in Spain and they do a lot of these routine questionings for people that fit a "certain" profile, which in my case meant that a shaved-head guy with a green-military jacket zipped all the way up (that's me!) wandering around in a station like if he's scoping the place triggered a lot of red flags on the surveillance room. And basically when that happens, the guys on that room contact the undercover guys so that these can approach the person, ask the routine questions and check the IDs.

Meanwhile, the other guy was seriously chatting on the phone. When he finally finished I was amazed with the amount of information that we was able to collect about me just using my ID information. They already knew that I've arrived that morning (including flight number) and that the info on my ID card was genuine. So, it was easy to believe they were the real thing.

And that was it. After that, they just sent me on my way apologising for having disturbed me. I still thought about asking to take a picture all together so that I could remember this precious moment (in which I was considered a potential terrorist) forever, but I guess that would be pushing my luck. And so, I said "Buenos Dias!" and went for a walk on the small but picturesque city of Valencia :)