Almost all of the sightseers said they had pre-booked flights which they were unable to change; many had resigned themselves to a trip to Washington consisting of shopping and viewing buildings from the outside.
Outdoor tables provide front-row viewing for the evening paseo in cheery Plaza del Cabildo.
Apple gets it in the neck ("When you buy an album on iTunes you're renting music rather than buying it; you're getting the equivalent of an IOU"), as does YouTube, for letting major artists fiddle their viewing figures.
Jeremy Clarkson's Top Gear toppled Doctor Who from the top of the BBC's iPlayer Christmas charts as on-demand viewing continued to boom, up 25% year on year.
Where once we waited eagerly to catch our weekly fix, these days we are masters of our own viewing destiny, choosing when to watch and, increasingly, what viewing platform to watch it on.
The BBC is likely to dominate Christmas viewing this year with a schedule including a Christmas Day edition of Doctor Who, starring Matt Smith and his successor as the doctor, Peter Capaldi, and the much-anticipated return of Sherlock on New Year's Day.
I can save some of those programs to a hard disk or a dedicated external device for later viewing at home.
He believes that the reverse should be true, that pay-TV companies such as BSkyB get the lion's share of their audience from channels such as the BBC, Channel 5 and ITV and should pay for the viewing they deliver.
The slump in audience numbers is a further sign of the fragmentation of TV viewing.
I believe online content, whether viewed through a connected TV or through a tablet, will support traditional viewing by allowing new audiences to be developed, new specialist interest groups to be reached and new catch-up opportunities to be offered.
That said, it's hard to imagine something so scabrous winning the approval of the Mercury judges, whose vision of music that represents Britain appears to be based on viewing Britain as a place where people drink designer beers in chic bars, not cans of lager on sagging sofas.
