Tweet This past April I visited my friends Antonella, Mauricio and their daughter Isabel in Barcelona. We had a tremendous time together. I filmed the train ride along the seashore as I approached Barcelona from Tarragona, about an hour to the south. Enjoy the sunshine and palm trees….

Tweet This past weekend I saw Woody Allen‘s new, well-crafted movie Vicky Christina Barcelona about two young American women coming to Barcelona for the summer and their foibles of finding love and the ensuing relationships’ disappointments. The story is very “Woody Allen” in that the characters fall in love with the wrong people and are never satisfied. But how humorous those messy relationships are! I’ll admit that I am totally biased as Barcelona and Oviedo (where the movie is filmed) are two of my favorite

Tweet During my recent trip to Spain, I got to know the executives/founders of a two interesting companies: Gonzalo Garcia and Ramon Leonato of GeoVirtual and Eduardo Arcos and Arturo Paniagua of Hipertextual. While they are under-the-radar now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they make it big in the future, especially as Internet penetration increases in Spain and Latin America. Currently, Internet penetration is 45% in Spain and 25% in Mexico. Even though those penetration rates are so low, Spanish represents the 3rd most used

Tweet During my trip here in Spain, I have learned about two new, innovative companies based in Barcelona that use funny, Spanglish brand names. The first is Bicing (combining the word “bicicleta” or bike in Spanish with the English suffix -ing), which provides rental services for people that want to bike around the city. You sign up on their web site Bicing.com and once you have a card, you can “take out” one of their red bikes from one of their many bike stands around

Tweet Here is something that is totally foreign to North American travelers: on-train magazines. That’s right…just like in-flight magazines but on the train. I neglected to mention on my previous post that when I took the high-speed train from Madrid to Barcelona that I read my first on-train magazine: Pasajes, which is produced by the editorial company COMFERSA here in Spain. In addition to the magazine for Renfe’s AVE (high-speed) train, they also have a magazine for their regular trains called En Punto. Will Amtrak

Tweet Yesterday I took the high-speed Renfe AVE train from Madrid to Barcelona. It used to take 8+ hours and now takes about 3 hours. An amazing experience. The best part of it is that instead of having to go to the airport in a taxi, wait 2-3 hours, go thru security, etc, you can show up 30 minutes or less before the train is supposed to leave, jump on the train and arrive in the center of Barcelona. Check out the video here….