Tag Archives: barcelona

In my last post, after our walkabout we said our farewells to Barcelona. Today – I rewind back a bit to a day between our getting overloaded with euro-awards in Innsbruck and my being overloaded with interviews and meetings at Mobile World Congress. For, whenever I can fit it in when here in Catalonia, I just have to get a rental car and cruise along one of my favorite roads – one that hugs its coast ->

En route, we occasionally stopped for walkabouts and the odd bite to eat in towns. Curiously, there was practically nobody about and most stores and cafes were closed. I was surprised the eateries we snacked at weren’t closed too. Ghost towns. And all on the typically (in summer) busy Costa Brava! ->

Read on…

As promised, more tales from the Catalonian side…

Work hard – play hard is one of my mottos, and that went for in Barcelona recently too. After working hard at Mobile World Congress, we had two free days on our hands. The first was taken up with getting to, up, and back down Montserrat, as reported a few days ago. In the morning of the second day we checked out the progress of the construction of Sagrada Família – which I told you about In yesterday’s post. Which left us with an afternoon, which we filled with a relaxed ramble around Park Güell (which I hadn’t been to in at least 20 years) and later along the famous pedestrianized tree-lined street called La Rambla (so, not quite “playing hard”, but we weren’t being idle either!). But first – the Gaudi (and Güell)-designed Park Güell…

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Sagrada Família is probably the most important touristic (architectural, cultural… basilical) building of Barcelona. Though its construction began in 1882 (no typo folks!) – overseen by no less than Antoni Gaudí himself – it still hasn’t been finished nearly a century-and-a-half later! Indeed, perma-construction is one of the church’s inalienable traits that makes it so unique. It’s like, how can you have a Sagrada Família that’s not under construction – since there’s never, ever, been such a thing?! When the project is finally completed, I’m fairly sure there’ll be something missing from its whole essence )…

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If ever you have a two or three hours to spare in Barcelona, there’s always plenty to choose from to fill those hours with something wow-touristic in the city. Just the easiest and most obvious often will do the job, like a stroll down La Rambla and around the Gothic Quarter. But should you ever have a full day to spare and the weather’s neither rainy or too hot, then you really need to get out of the city. And one of the best local destinations has to be Montserrat (the mountain; not to be confused with the island that was named after it, which isn’t quite local;).

A truly wonderful construction – a multi-peaked ragged-jagged mountain range surrounded by lower and more undulating hills. Could it be the start of the Pyrenees? No – the edge of those is nearly a hundred kilometers away…

(I wanted to take a pic like the one above, but none of mine came out ok; therefore, thank-you Wikipedia)

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Hola amigos!

From Innsbruck, off we flew (with our top awards in our luggage) to Barcelona. Once there, we headed on over to the vast Fira Barcelona venue (awards in hand!) for a monster of an exhibition-conference. And the monster was of course Mobile World Congress (MWC). As usual, everyone who’s anyone in the mobile communications/IT world was there, and it was rammed, noisy and fun! ->

I call it a monster due to its size: like a monster truck, it’s gigantic. It’s also a survivor. For it’s been around since practically year-dot when it comes to large mobile/IT exhibitions-conferences, and hasn’t fallen by the wayside like some of its former “colleagues” like the once-similarly massive CeBIT or COMDEX. MWC has managed to keep up with the times, modernize and diversify; or, to put it simpler – it just became all the more shiny and super-interesting to appeal to a broader audience. ¡Respeto!

Our romance with MWC goes way back – to when it was still known as 3GSM (it became MWC in 2008). Alas, I don’t have much to show for it today – since I’d never heard of “blogging” in the early 2000s. My earliest published bits and pieces hail back to 2010 and 2011 (just a few pics on Kaspersky Club (Google Translate text only)). Sure, MWC’s had it’s bad patches (like in 2021), but it’s bounced back (and gotten bigger and cooler and flashier every year). ¡Mucho respeto!

And here we were again ->

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Welcome back to Barcelona folks!

After the few days of business in the city, as per, it was time for some express-tourism. Well of course it was – such a beautiful, sunny part of the world as this is! ‘Tourism? But there’s a pandemic on!’. Indeed, this post may come across somewhat provocative, and for that I apologize. What with covid still lingering, it’s hardly politically correct to wax lyrical about visits to world-class tourist destinations now is it? A bit like… A Feast in a Time of Plague, even. So, here goes with my brief justifications: (i) we didn’t go to Catalonia simply for tourism – this was a brief post-scriptum dosage thereof after our reason for coming – MWC-2021; (ii) we were super-careful and followed all the rules and observed all the restrictions to the letter; and (iii) I took plenty of pics while there, which really do need to be shared ). Justifications sufficient? Eek. Hope so…

Actually, though I don’t encourage everyone to pile down to Barcelona/Girona just now as that would cancel out what I’m about to say, right now is a perfect time for tourism here. The reason is simple: all the places of interest for tourists are practically empty. For example, here’s Barcelona’s famous La Rambla; normally you can’t move for the crowds. Look at it today:

You’d think it was February or some other low-season month.

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Hi folks!

And now, after yesterday’s mostly miserable post, a positive one!…

This year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona actually went ahead! Hurray!

And I was there in person! Hurray!

And I spoke up on stage! Hurray!

And I gave a slew of interviews to international media! Hurray!

And some ‘fans’ of mine asked for autographs selfies! Grrr. Joke!

Last year, being all 2020, MWC was cancelled. The world’s largest mobile event just didn’t happen; imagine?!

This year – despite the lingering 2020ness (still some closed borders, plenty of restrictions still in place, traveling difficulties, and the conservative conduct of many companies) – the show went on, as it must!

Read on…

Quite unexpectedly, it turns out that the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is taking place at the same time that the F1 teams are test driving at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya. Well, obviously we have to go there! And, well, here we are!

During these test sessions the venues are usually deserted – no noisy crowds, no stony-faced security, no rushing to and from one part of the track to another and none of the hot dog fast-food smells. Nothing!

What’s new?

Read on: A fly in the ointment…

Location: Earth, Europe, Spain, Catalonia, Barcelona, Mobile World Congress 2017.

Another year, another season, and I’m back into my must-attend event-extraordinaire-schedule. And the Barcelonan MWC is one such must-attend event-extraordinaire. I’ve already written plenty about the basics regarding this annual technology show, and I don’t want to repeat all that this year. But last year I was here for such a short length of time that I had no time to look around properly. This year there were carefully planned pauses between my scheduled appointments, so I was able to get my camera out and go walkabout around this extraordinary exhibition.

But this post isn’t a professional analysis of the Barcelona conference; for that – check out specialized media. Here: merely a synopsis – and pics – of what the CEO of a cybersecurity company found most curiously interesting, if not breathtaking…

1. This event is just so grandiose! Check out my pics from last year, which demonstrate this well. Eight (8!) such exhibition caverns like this:

Read on: Big guns really impress with their big stands…

Phew. Another regional partner conference done and dusted. We have quite a few every year: North American (this year in Cancun); Latin America (recently in Bolivia, but this year I sadly couldn’t make it); and APAC (just the other week in Vietnam). There’s also an ‘Emerging Markets’ conference – the one that we’ve just done and dusted, in Barcelona – which covers Latin America (yep, they’re lucky – they get two conferences a year), Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

As always it was as always: meetings, presentations, discussion, negotiations and so on: the serious bit. Then there was the fun bit: a gala dinner, this time in Barcelona’s Maritime Museum. Super place for a super supper :).