Voices en Español

If you’ve ever gone on vacation or visited a foreign country where the food and drink was divine, one of the best souvenirs of a memorable trip is a bottle of wine or a container of food that is unlike anything you can find back home.

But how to get the items through customs?

In the past, it used to be easy. These days, with tightened airline security measures and weight restrictions related to luggage, there’s less space and more incentive to bring back nothing.

Here are two web sites that will whet your appetite and help you avoid having to deal with pesky U.S. customs.: La Tienda and Amigo Foods.

La Tienda, a Virginia-based company, specializes in food and wine from Spain. It tends to be on the gourmet, upscale side of the gastronomic scale.

Amigo Foods, which describes itself as an “online Latino grocery store,” has a broad selection of products from the Caribbean, Mexico, Central and South America as well as from Spain. A few items, [for example, Spanish blood pudding sausages (morcilla)], are made in the U.S., but the overwhelming majority of the products are imported directly from their countries of origin.

Even if you’re not in the mood to buy any food, it’s still fun to scroll through the pages of these sites. The Amigo Foods website could be especially useful to teachers who need info and photos of items for their classes about food and beverages in different Spanish-speaking countries.