It was great to meet Carles, David, Yolanda, Jose, Alex, and the whole Lledia team.
They have a very nice Sakai installation and are doing some very unique work using Sakai that they will share with the community when it is more mature. The short version is that they are building basic Enterprise software like helpdesk software, student evaluations and doing it all in Sakai, JSF, and Hibernate. Very Cool.
Lledia is a great place to visit – the weather is like Phoenix and flora is like Los Angeles. There is a neat castle in the center of the town. It is very hot during the day – often above 100F. But the evenings are *very* nice.
For dinner we went to a very very special restaraunt – it is a small family run restaraunt that makes the Llledia specialty – snails to perfection. The the photo blog for snal pictures when I get back and sent in all of the pictures.
This is not like french style snails – they are land delling snails. They are pretty small – about 1/2 – 3/4 incin across. The snails are arranged in a flat iron pan with their shell opening pointing up. They are alive. Then they are seasoned with some salt and some paprika and then they are cooked over charcoal.
Then after about 20 minutes, they come to your table and you use a sharp little needle like thing to get them out and eat them. MMM-good! Sometimes they are a little undercooked and the snail’s mucous did not completely cook away – you can either eat it or wipe it off.
The snails were so awsome.
Also Lleida has a beer factory – San Miguel – I liked the beer too – kind of a combination of a medium body with a very solid taste.
In Barcelona I met with cool folks from the Caalan Government and a very very cool open source lawyer (yes you heard me right – a cool lawyer). Malcom was his name (he is originally from London) and he was using his lawyer skillz to further the cause of open source and help make licensing better and help university lawyers and administrators better undertand open source. Of course I liked him!