At home

Home is the Place we Live In. Our best souvenirs are born at home, our dearest people are there, our life grows among these walls.
this is why switching off at home is a meaningful action.

The Earth Hour in Bucharest

Buildings immersed into darkness, candle lit shows, astronomical observations or unplugged concerts. This is the way our town will celebrate Earth Hour in Romania, that will be officially organized for the first time in 2009.

In Bucharest,the authorities have confirmed turning off the lights of some symbolic buildings: the Romanian Athenaeum, the National Theater, the Town Hall, The National Art Museum, the Romanian Opera, the Intercontinental Hotel. The House of the People (Parliament Palace), the largest civil building in the world, will have its exterior lighting off for an hour, starting at 20:30. The electricity savings at the Palace of Parliament will be about 1700 kW, which means 0,825 tons of CO2 emissions less. Reduced lighting in the Constitution Square will allow WWF volunteers to form the number 60, the symbol of the event, using candles. In the Constitution Square an unplugged concert will take place and the Bucharest Astronomy Club will install two telescopes for the interested people to see the planets whose visibility is usually very low because of light pollution in our capital.

In addition, over 30 companies have announced participation in Earth Hour, communicating the campaign message to their employees and customers. They will discontinue the lighting at their headquarters in Bucharest and the country.

An exhibition

Beyond the tree in bloom, the publicity for a new exhibition about the origins of humankind.
Nature and men get twinned in a constant progress and transformation. Everything changes, nothing is lost. At least, nothing should be lost, not even history.
The exhibition will close on the 17th May. You might see it. Then, we could discuss the way we became what we are.

March Days in Cismigiu

Empty benches, almost motionless alleys, naked trees, a few passers-by, old people resting or absent-minded lovers, the mermaid shivering in her pond, shy flowers contrasting with the old Town Hall, cloudy sky, red and white threads tied to the first blooming branches, melancholy, anticipation, this is what I found in Cismigiu today.

Caring for the words

This is a book we were given for the Educational classes. I like it, I read it as if it was a novel: could not leave it from my hand. It's called "You are COOL (in English) even if you speak correctly" and it aims to show the young people the most frequent mistakes in the media and in our daily communication. It's the result of years of monitoring TV and radio stations.
It deals with pronunciation, morphology, stylistics, semantics, punctuation, subtle yet very common mistakes, when you get to take notice of them. It's very concise, funny and clear, has lots of examples, very short explanations and lots of exercises, too.
And the last cover says: if you are interested in many things, how about being cool not for having a laptop or great skates, how about being cool for the things you know? Accessories are not everything. How about being cool to your friends for speaking correctly?

This is another way of helping the language survive, of caring for its health and well-being.
Oh, I must admit I learned I was making a mistake...

Words, words, words

Planes, cars, trains, boats, internet for communication. Different speed, different price, different energy. But, we still have a more powerful tool: language. Words to express our opinions, wishes, pains. Words to show surprise, fear, happiness. Words to convey knowledge, feelings, emotions, gossips. Nevertheless, our language has not always been the same. Being, as it is, a living being, it has gone a long path. Unfortunately, there is not much public recognition for the early stages of our mother tongue. I am proud they have done it here. Just this monument to remember The Spanish Language Path: El Camino de la Lengua Española.
If you look at it, the monument is a kind of huge sheet of paper with a feather, symbol of the ancient writers.
It mentions the places where the first written documents were found.
The reading is from one of Santa Teresa's works. More or less: How great knowledge and letters are for everything! I like the quotation.

And the chosen setting couldn't have been better: this garden opposite the Rastro Wall where Doña Guiomar balcony is. That lady who communicated with her banned lover in the mountain with her handkerchief. Isn't it the perfect place to celebrate communication?
May our languages never get tired of us!

First spring colours

Although slowly and in a shy way, some purple is growing on trees in town. They give colour to the old mansions where long time ago knights and ladies lived. They may not have seen these leaves, but most probably they enjoyed the frangrance in the inner court.

New and Old

As the new life comes to meet the light, the remainders of the old must make room. Nature's laws.

Surprises

As I was going to the Old Court to see a fair (see it in the magazine!) I discovered three peculiar things.
The first is a counting machine, as far as I can tell. It was in the window of an old eyeglasses shop, but it was closed today. I plan to go again to find out more. I love it, I wish I knew how it works. It also has a crank on the other side. Seems very strange, to count using a mechanical device. My 5th graders could use some help with the division!The second is a statue without name. I don't know what it represents, but I have the distinct feeling I've seen it before. Only I don't ever go that way.
And the third is just an old fountain, that we must have passed by thousands of times as we had our so called "production practice" classes in high-school in the neighbourhood, but never noticed.
Aren't they strange, our perceptions?

8th March. Women's Day

This poster form the Spanish Language Department shows the names of great women writers in spain. Some of them, forgotten just because they were women and others with big success in their careers. But all of them, very interesting.

Look at the lady mathematician, she's just by herself waiting for another colleague to share this moment of fame in our entrance hall.

And our contribution to the exhibition. We named our porject: The Path to Women's Suffrage. We understood the best way to show our respect was remembering the first steps into the right to vote. The Seneca Falls Convention was the beginning. I wanted this poor poster to be my personal homage to these brave women.

Because the path was not easy. Men saw great danger in these suffragists' activities. Their position in osciety was to be different. And so it was!

To get this poster of feminists at the door of a school department where there are three women and two men, anonymous women had to suffer all kind of insults, isolation, pain.
Than you, you gave us the amazing gift of voting.

A Bagful of Poetry

One of the nicest places in town is "Carturesti" (an invented name made of "carturar", an old form for "learned" and "Bucuresti"). It's a combination of bookshop, music shop and tea shop, where you can spend a few wonderful and relaxing hours among books, CD's, DVD's, albums, drawings, tea and accessories, photos, candles and all kind of nice objects that some would call useless.
Their last initiative, We Collect Poetry, concerns bringing back poetry into our lives and its catch phrase is : Pozia mai seduce sau se duce? (Does poetry still seduce or is it gone?) As you see, it's a word game putting together "seduce" (seduces) and "se duce" (is going).
It invites people to bring their favourite poem, in any form they choose, but even better in a personalized one.
All the poems are to be collected in a truck and anyone can read them. In the end, they will be turned into an art book and kept in the bookstore. Maybe I will contribute, if I have the time to choose a poem these days.

photos from Metropotam

Civilization

I only managed to find two of the ten kinds of posters of this contest, but you can see the rest of them here.
It's a team contest aiming to bring back or reinforce the ideas of respecting the ones around, the community as well as the nature. Each poster reflects one the rules of civil behaviour and the slogan is Move you common sense! (It's supercool to be civilized). The rules are simple, things we should all do without thinking: wait in the line, use the headphones when you listen to music, turn off the mobile phone at a show, use the garbage bins, take care of the environment etc. The teams are to choose a rule and find strategies in order to make it effective as widely as possible in the community.
As you see by the torn poster, some people around are already feeling threatend. Good! Let's hope they really are!

A neighbour

She was just by the window of class 5B, looking at us while we were learning abut fractions. But she obviously had more important things on her mind: the future of generations and generations of doves was in her care, hidden in the tiny eggs in the nest she and her mate had built. Quite a big responsibility, don't you think so? No wonder she looks so serious.
I asked the kids in 5B not to scare her, because she would leave her eggs to get cold, and it was the first time in 6 months they were perfectly silent for... a few minutes.

Reading Promoting

Reading is an example of active leisure that many of our students refuse as a plague. Perhaps it is because it requires peace, concentration, analysis, assimilation. Attitudes that always reming them of study.
This is why Reading Promoting Plans are necessary. There is one of these started at school this year. The most visual aspect is the activity: “I read, I construct”. With the moto, Whenever we read, a wall against ignorance, isolation is being built, we are, and how not in Ávila?, building a wall. A structure has been created in the Art department, joining columns in the entrance hall and the reading cards are the stones.
It began a month ago. There are not many stones, but it is gaining followers little by little.
We could have a colourful wall by the end of the school year.

Funny Urban Legends

Although there is no subject on urban myths at the Sociology or Anthropology Faculty, the legends that set fire to the imagination of a whole community say a lot about that city, even if some of them are totally hilarious. One attentive observer can see in them contemporary fears and worries, as well as a need to fill an empty space, as a result of the disappearing of the real myths and traditions.
Bucharest has its own share of funny myths that nobody witnessed but many can swear are true. They start with the old ones, as the one concerning an old deserted church supposedly inhabited by the devil (because of it's crooked cross- in reality the result of bombing in WW2). If you pass it by night time, you can supposedly hear voices inside and see the number 666 as a shadow on its wall. The most recent legend is about the card readers in buses and trams, that are meant to be a kind of Big Brother, following you and scanning your entire body, able to report everything about your breakfast.
But the most numerous and the nicest legends are still the ones coming from the communist era, many connected to its big constructions: the subway and the House of People. Here are three of them.
They say the busiest street in town, Victory Avenue, was closed for traffic for a pretty long while, because Ceausescu thought it dangerous for his safety. He was the only person allowed to go there by car. Incredibly for us, it had become a peaceful place where kids sat down drawing and even grass had started growing in the cracks.
The second one is about a subway driver who having to announce the following station unintentionally said, instead of "next- New Times" (this was the real name of the station), "next- Hard Times". They say he was arrested soon after.
And the third-also on the subway. There were big problems with water infiltrations in one station, but it had to be inaugurated on time, in the presence of the dictator. He noticed that the walls had a special glow (water was dripping along them) and he asked about the cause. For fear, he was told it was a special kind of paint so he ordered that all the stations would be painted with this nice new paint.
Hilarious? True? Embarrassing? Naive? Nostalgic?

Art & use

I used to watch this structure in my walks. I found it very curious. I wondered about its hidden meaning trying to find a connection between my world of ideas and it. Was it scale to heaven?
A climb to the highest peak in Gredos? A celebration of geometry?
I used to stop in front of it and watched it from different places. I didn't ask because I wanted to get the solution to my questions. But, why didn't other people stop by it? what had I missed?
Then suddenly one day, I heard somebody walking ahead say: " What a good idea! People can't jump any longer from the wall" And I understood. The structure is on top of a wall that separates a garden from a street. Young people jumped from the garden to the street and there had been severe accidents.
It was more than art. It was use too.