April 23rd

There are a lot of celebrations today where we live.
It is our Region Day. Celebrations are mainly held in Villalar de los Comuneros, a village in Valladolid, where the rebels from our community were executed in 1521. A sad rebellion! Sad because it was fair and had no good end.
It is also Book Day. This particular year, because of family reasons, I have adopted a kind of combination of Book Day and San Jordi's Day in Catalonia. The tradition there is to give a rose and a book. Here's my breakfast table with roses and books for the ones at home.
In Barcelona there will be a different celebration, I hope.

wishing you a very good day

Earth Day 2

This free slideshow made with Smilebox

My personal homage to Earth.

Pi Day FlashMeeting

After a snowy morning, getting ready for the FlashMeeting was really a huge task.
























Congratulations Irina! Once again you have succeeded. And we are learning little by little how to manage our own problems in the Places we Live In. Well done, young lady!

pi

numbers and letters, numbers and names, numbers and people. Guess which is my pi.

Enjoy the Day. It will be especial for me, I have never celebrated any Maths concept. Thanks.

Crisis Prices

These two week-ends we are having an annual event called "Bucharest Days". It's supposed to be more important this year, because our town is celebrating 550 years since its name was first mentioned in an official document. The programme for the event is theoretically very rich, but the enthusiasm is not matching. Maybe it's the too often mentioned crisis that we are worried about, but there was almost no media coverage, and the general feeling was the one you can see on the organ grindler's face. It's so clear!
He's one of the many costumed characters meant to revive the "Little Paris" atmosphere. The parrots were supposed to pick a little piece of paper revealing your future, for a small fee. The text on his instrument is the real gem: "Love:5 lei, future: 5 lei, destiny: 5 lei". The crisis prices our life has.
The photo is from metropotam.ro.

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.

Dragobete

Tomorrow is the Romanian version for Valentine's Day, Dragobete, the day for both people and birds to find their mates.
The Village Museum organized a festival and invited its visitors to songs, dances, sweets, souvenirs.
It's a day for kindness to all the living creatures, of peace and understanding. A day without violence. Hopefully. It's also considered the beginning of spring, just before March 1st, the season's celebration.
May all of you find place for love, spring and hope in your hearts!

De Craciun, ne-am luat ratia de libertate!

This was written in the center of the town during the last days of 1989. It means: this Christmas we got our freedom ration. It's a most eloquent phrase. There are two key words in this phrase: ration and freedom.

I can't stop thinking of the revolution these days, as it all started on December 16th in Timisoara. I must shamefully admit I knew nothing until the 22nd, when the big bubble burst. Things were very much covered, nobody was allowed to talk about the revolt at work (and everyone was afraid to) and I was not one of those who spent the nights furtively listening to Radio Free Europe, the ear stuck to the radio. I had other things on my mind: a baby, a very ill mother, a hard commute, a husband working at the other end of the map and above all, the biggest worry we (almost) all had: to get the bare necessities covered, day in day out.

Remember the word "ration"? Mostly everything was rationalized, from hot water to food, even bread- for the small communities. Since Bucharest is a big town, they could not provide the rations for everyone- so here it was the survival of the fittest. The stores were most of the time completely empty. The joy to be able, after long hours of queing, to buy flour, or tooth paste, or cotton wool, or eggs!

The second word was "freedom". What people longed for, maybe even more than food, was free speach, free opinion, the absence of fear. There were two sentences circulating- only among those who really trusted each others. A militant one: "we can't go on living like rats"; and a hopeless one: "polenta will never explode". Well, it did.

We have food in stores now, and the freedom to speak our mind. Things are not exactly what we have dreamed of, but there is hope.

I will be in Timisoara for the next days, I will humbly put a flower and a candle on the steps of the Cathedral, where those kids were shot. Many of their bodies were never found or identified. May they rest in peace, wherever they are.

An Homage

Many of our most beloved actors have died lately, at an age which would have allowed them to give their spectators many beautiful performances.
But yesterday, one of the greatest actors, a former head of the National Theater, a writer and an anchor of the Romanian theater, Radu Beligan, turned 90.
He celebrated his birthday by rehearsing for a new play, learning a new part. When asked why, he quoted Socrates, who was once asked why he was learning how to play the lyre as he was near death. His answer was : so that I am able to play before I die.
A humble bow.