Jean Galea

Gomeep is another electric scooter alternative. You get a new Xiaomi scooter and keep it with you, so there is no element of sharing here. It’s just like buying your own electric scooter, but instead, you only pay €39/month and that includes maintenance and pumping up the tyres every two months or whenever necessary.

Not only is the scooter of very high quality, but the Gomeep team also made some important modifications to the basic Xiaomi scooter. They added a quality lock that can be used for quick errands when you need to briefly leave the scooter unattended. They also reinforced certain parts of the scooter that are prone to fail, hence enhancing rider safety.

One other cool thing that they include in the membership is theft insurance as well as third-party insurance. If your scooter gets stolen, you will have to pay around 100 euros but the rest is covered by insurance. More importantly, in the unlikely event of an accident with third parties such as a bike rider or a pedestrian, you are insured so the insurance will take care of any claims by the third party.

The guys at Gomeep deliver the scooter to your house or other point of your convenience, and are ready to assist you with maintenance anywhere you need.

I’ve been using Gomeep for my daily commute to my coworking space, and I really enjoy the morning and evening rides on the scooter. It’s just like surfing through town, you get to enjoy the vibe of Barcelona in an effortless way as you whiz from one point to another.

Battery life is very good, it can do around 25 kilometers on one charge, and charging the battery is very simple, you just plugin the charges as you would do with a laptop or other device. I let it charge overnight so I’m sure we’re ready to go in the morning. In many coworking spaces you will also find other users that have chargers so you might be able to charge it at the coworking space itself.

Gomeep have some excellent reviews already, here’s just a sample of happy users:

I have been a GOMEEP user for a few months now and could not be happier! My own scooter kept breaking down and needed repairs. Now with my GOMEEP the service is what I appreciate most, always quick and convenient! Would highly recommend as the best option for transportation in Barcelona!

I highly recommend Gomeep to those who have a regular commute and love electric scooters but don’t want the hassle of purchasing one and having to maintain it themselves. Electric scooters are still a new technology so we will be seeing newer and better versions coming out very regularly, hence I think it is wiser to rent on a monthly basis than invest in a new scooter that might be obsolete in a year or two.

Join Gomeep and get €10 off the first month

After having visited the USA many times I have no doubts about wanting to live in Europe, although I enjoy visiting the U.S. from time to time. I have avoided writing about the topic on this blog since I never really had to think hard about it and weight the pros and cons of each; it was just clear to me which I preferred.

Growing up I like many other millions of people worldwide thought the U.S. was the ultimate place to be, but after visiting I saw that it is far from the idolised place that we see in movies.

Since I call Spain home these days, a tweet from entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky on Twitter caught my attention and I thought I’d repost his thoughts here for anyone interested in comparing Spain to the United States.

Of course, there are many other nuances one should consider, and I wouldn’t stay that Spain is better than the U.S. outright, but it’s good to know about the ways in which they differ and then make an informed decision on where you want to live.

Link to Tweet

Tweet content

Just landed in Madrid flying from San Francisco and traveling around the USA where I lived for 20 years and I frequently work. The San Francisco vs Madrid change makes me wonder.<

• Why are homeless people so rare in Madrid and so common in San Francisco when here GDP per capita is half?
• Why is the murder rate 500% higher in California than in Spain?
• Why is health care free even for tourists in Spain paid for by Spanish taxpayers as a human right and so incredibly expensive and cumbersome in California? Our son fell in the bathtub and we had a $12k bill for a few stitches at Stanford University emergency room.
• Why are universities in Spain free and there is no student debt while in the USA there is more student debt than the GDP of Spain?
• Why are there in the USA more people in jail/parole than there are inhabitants in Madrid the third largest city in Europe?
• Why is litigation so common in the USA and so rare in Spain?
• Why is inequality in the USA twice as high as that of Spain?
• Why does Spain who borders Africa and has a much bigger illegal immigration problem than the USA provides amnesties for those who work for three years and USA separates parents from kids and conducts violent raids? Has 11 million hard working people who it refuses to legalize.
• Why do people live 4 more years in Spain than US while Spain spends 70% less per person in health care?

Spain is not perfect, housing costs are high, good jobs are tougher to find, half of Catalonians want out, political corruption is unacceptable, universities produce no Nobel prizes.

But here cancer does not mean bankruptcy, pregnancies come with maternity leave, long vacations available to all, gun deaths, opium deaths are almost unheard of and in 09 when unemployment shot up crime surprisingly went down.

Spain has the fastest growing large economy of Europe. It is a welcoming democracy loved by the millions of foreigners who live here. Looking for an alternative country to live in? Consider Spain.

USA is amazing at solving intricate science and technology problems that no other country has solved but struggles at solving every day life challenges that all other developed nations have solved.