Festival of Sant Antoni: The parade of the animals

Our four-year-old came home very excited today from school, telling us how all the animals were going to be out on the street really early Sunday morning. Our wannabe street-wise older son kept telling him that it was nonsense, that animals didn’t go on the street, that they’d get run over by cars, that it’s just stuff that kids say, etc.

So we checked in the Tot Sant Cugat, and guess what, younger brother was right!

On Sunday, January 23th Sant Cugat celebrates the annual festival of Sant Antoni, also called “Festa dels Tres Tombs”. (Apparently it has nothing to do with tombs.)

It involves an animal parade which will stop at the old townhall (Placa Barcelona), where the priest will bless all the animals. From what I’ve been able to read, this was an originally pagan festival that was rebranded as Christian.

Weekend excursion in Sant Cugat: Calçots at Can Borrell

If it’s a sunny Sunday in winter, you can find half of Sant Cugat along the trail to have lunch or breakfast at Masia Can Borrell, which is about 2.5 km walk from the roundabout near the Europa School. It’s a nice “starter” hike if your kids aren’t used to it. Ours whined for the first 100m or so, but once they realized we weren’t turning around they started to have fun.

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Make sure you have reservations, and it’s best to arrive early for lunch (1:30) otherwise the food can take a while. You can also have breakfast from 10-12.

Calçots are a type of green onion typical to this region that is roasted and eaten with a special salvitxada sauce. The usual season is February-March, but you can find them in many places starting in January.

It’s a very messy affair, so you get a bib and plastic gloves to help you out. The procedure is like this: first take off the outer shell (which usually pretty burnt from the bbq), then hold it at one end, dip it into the sauce and the lower it into your mouth from above. Lots of fun for adults and kids alike.

Eight Global Cities: Sant Cugat?

Rather impressed by the Living Labs recent choice for digital service innovation, where Barcelona, Cape Town, Eindhoven, Lagos, San Francisco, Sant Cugat, Stockholm and Taipei were chosen to select companies and organizations that have developed digital services to help their citizens. Nice going!

World Innovation Summit in Barcelona

I spent the last two days at the World Innovation Summit here in Barcelona. It was relatively high profile, with two A list speakers. The atmosphere was a bit too formal for my taste, but I suppose that innovators in medicine, the automotive industry, etc still need to wear suits. The event was entirely in English, which was a nice change for me.

The first big name was Dennis Crowley, the founder of FourSquare, who told the story about the founding of his company and his experiences as an entrepreneur. What struck me was how his motivation was basically “I wanted to be able to do X, no one else was doing it, so I just did it myself”. No estimates of billion dollar markets, gross margins, user studies, etc. After his talk he got pummeled by a VC (who was nice enough to add a disclaimer that he was an investor in a competitor to FourSquare), with the usual questions about profitability, etc. Same questions that people were asking about Facebook and Google before. Dennis took it all in good humor.

Richard Florida, an expert in the field of regional economic development was the other featured speaker. He is somewhat controversial in the US for his thesis that neighborhoods that attract gays tend to be the more creative and innovative parts of the city. Richard got an incredibly formal introduction, with a table of four introducers giving long-winded speeches (is that a normal thing to do here?). The guy from the Barcelona town hall decided play local politics and give his introduction in Catalan (with no translation provided). Richard was generally very positive about Barcelona’s progress as a center of innovation (one of very few cities where the Olympics actually had a positive impact).

The second day was a bit less crowded and focused more on individual entrepreneurs (each given 3 minutes to do an “elevator pitch”). My personal favorites were the chicken vaccine guy from Mexico and the fully automatic roti machine about to take the market by storm in India.

It was very cool to see the Tesla car parked outside the convention center, and Cristiano Carlutti from TESLA was there to give his pitch during the Electric Vehicle Mobility session.

The round-table on health-care innovation was very interesting. The “virtualization” of biotech, where a startup can outsource pretty much all the capital intensive chemistry, trials, etc and concentrate entirely on proof-of-concept was a very encouraging development. It also seems like the FDA’s risk-aversion is set on completely strangling new product development in the US. Elisabet de los Pinos made some interesting points about how European government grants require you to do the exact opposite (hire lots of post-docs) of what you should really do (prove your hypothesis at the lowest possible cost).

Ken Morse made us all feel like MBA students as he tried to spice up a round table on IT innovation by having participants come up with 3 cosmic ideas on the future of IT. These included the death of IT, the death of Microsoft, the death of Google, the death of humanity (in the form of large asteroids, but apparently virtual idea shaped ones). There was some disagreement about whether CIOs should be fired, turned into sales people or just executed on the spot. The guy from PriceLine seemed to think he’d stumbled into a session on motivational speaking, so he spent all his time blathering on about how every morning he spends some time finding out what is possible today that wasn’t possible yesterday.

Finally a VP from Google came and gave the same talk I’ve seen a dozen times by different Googlers about how innovation happens at Google. He said Google does innovation based on hard data rather than dictatorial CEOs… meow. He did show off his iPad, so it wasn’t all Apple-hating.

Squeezing the small guys

The government continues its policy of trying to soak the middle class to pay for decreasing the deficit. Now they want to raise the regulated portion of electric rates by 10%:

The Ministry of Industry has prepared a draft Ministerial Order on the proposed increase from July 1 the regulated electricity tariffs (so-called access tolls) by 10% for homes and small businesses, 5% for medium voltage customers and 0% for large consumers (mainly industry).

This is on top of the increase in VAT for July.

Meanwhile, the story about raising the taxes on the rich has pretty much disappeared (other than Catalunya’s rather symbolic 1% raise).

Perhaps people just need to get more creative, like this builder (who also incapable of building a vertical wall, as demonstrated on left with a level and a piece of cheese) in Mira-sol, who decided to run a hose from the municipal park next door to water the garden:

The return of the mosquitoes

With the very sudden arrival of summer in Sant Cugat, the mosquitoes are trying to make up for lost time. Unfortunately my wife and kids are the designated mosquito magnets in our family and are taking the brunt of the attack.

I smuggledimported a Mosquito Magnet here from the US, but after running it for a month, the only insect it caught was a poor bee that accidentally wandered into it.

Has anyone had any luck with other anti-mosquito measures?

I’ve just ordered one of these mosquito traps… I’ll post my results.

Sant Cugat pays the bills on time

Sant Cugat made the Financial Times on a story about how the municipality has kept itself out of financial trouble (Thanks Jeremy!).

One revolutionary idea was to pay suppliers within 30 days. Local governments in Spain tend to regard accounts payable as a sort of free loan that they can use to stretch out finances as long as possible. Of course, nothing being free, suppliers just end up needing to charge more, or go under without the money to pay their own bills.

Since the suppliers tend to be local businesses, towns end up only sabotaging themselves.