Italy. A dream fulfilled

Since I was a child I always knew that I would live in Italy (for some time). It was the year 2016 and after starting my second university degree I had a clear objective: I wanted an Erasmus experience in Italy. After doing the paperwork, I had the fortune to get a place for the eternal city: Rome. It was my dream, but it had just begun.

This was my room:

The room had two floors. The main floor had two Doric columns, a sink and a shower in a corner behind the bed. This bed was under the stairs of the second floor.

The upper part had another double bed. The ceiling gave off an indirect light. It had painted a fresco of a sun in another depth, illuminated with a warm dim light. It was lovely to see the ceiling during the night, without a doubt the most beautiful one I ever saw in a room... But what I liked most was the morning light, entering through the huge window.

It was perfect from the beginning.

From that moment I lived a beautiful year, visiting the places I had dreamed when I was a child: the Coliseum, the Fontana di Trevi, the Imperial Forums, the Vatican City, the Pantheon and the Circus Maximus were some of the first places…

I had some very intense months, visiting places and meeting new people. I tried to know other cities around Italy, and that, among other places, took me to cities such as Verona. There I visited Juliet's house, and I met the wall of lovers. The wall is located at the entrance to the patio of the house, and couples write their names on it, to preserve their love for the rest of their lives.

Another of the cities that I was able to meet was other of my favorite ones, for its entire cultural legacy in the Italian Renaissance. Florence. I love the Renaissance. Since I was a kid I read stories about Leonardo da Vinci, and I admired him for all his abilities. When I was 18 years old I bought a famous video game called Assassin's Creed, set in the city of Florence in the Renaissance, and of course, when I was there, I made a wonderful photo imitating Ezio Auditore (the protagonist) ...

I was in many small towns and villages, but I could spend hours talking about them, so finally I will talk about my experience in the city of the canals: 

Venice

I had the great opportunity to visit Venice in the most important event of each year: Carnival. History, beauty and mysticism that Carnival of Venice has…  It’s unique in the world. All people have a maximum respect for their conservation, and the costumes they use are works of art…

Beyond the gondola rides, the canals, and the magic of the city, the best moment was without a doubt in the middle of Piazza di San Marco. A group of ladies was posing for the journalists who were covering the event and without thinking twice; I got in the middle of the photo to immortalize the moment. Everyone laughed, including the ladies, who were very serious before!

I am sure that I will live in Rome in the near future, I love Italy in all its virtues, and I still have a lot to discover. Sincerely, if you have not decided to visit it yet, I can only say one thing. 

Do it, you will not regret…

One Piece

Hello everyone, today I am going to talk about one of my passions that is the One Piece manga. The author of this incredible work is Eiichirō Oda, a japanese manga writer. This piece begin in 1997 and continues in development at one volume per week. It has more than 900 volumes, exactly 941 and and he has only made 70 percent of the complete piece.

One Piece has sold more than 450 million of copies around the world and has a Guinness World Record for the most copies published for the same comic book series by a single author. Nothing less than 320.866.000 of copies until 2014.

One piece is a pirate adventure manga in which the premise of the main character is to become the king of the pirates but this is impossible without his “nakamas”. Nakama is a japanese word that means a great feeling of friendship but more than a family, it is like your friends become your real family and you feel that you need to protect your nakamas at all cost. Luffy, Zoro, Sanji, Nami, Ussop, Chopper, Franky, Robin and Brook are the main members of this kind of family.

I knew this work when I was only a 10 years old child and I've been seeing it since then.

Since I met One Piece I have read many mangas. The culture of Japan is fascinating and mangas are impregnated with all that culture. You can learn a lot reading mangas.

I think you should reads this kind of literature. Almost every manga has a impressive plot and make you spend hours reading. And could teach you about friendship, conflict resolution, overcoming, honor, not giving up... You can contact me if you need any recommendation.

The dance in my life

Since I was a child, I liked a lot of activities when I had free time after school: Roller skating, swimming, aerobics ... But since I was seven from now, I decided to practice dancing.

Practicing dance I had the best moments in my life and the worst too. I started dancing in Lalin in a little group who`s name is Máisquedanza, but now is a big group with 400 dancers between 4 and 60 years old. During the year, we practice one hour per week because all of us are students out of our town, on Fridays is the only chance that we can met. In every year we make 2 public dancings at the end of june with the end of the school course, except in my case because we participate in a few competitions.

Last weekend, in Lalín was presented the Stars Dance competition, organized by a dance company from Portugal. Máisquedanza presented 11 choreographies and 7 of them have won, also winning the prize for best school, best dancer kids, and revelation choreographer. The two choreographies that I presented with my group won two first prizes.

In Máisquedanza we practice modern dance: jazz, lyric, contemporary, fusion, hip-hop ... we don’t focus only in one of them, we try to play all of them. I know I'm not going to be a professional dancer, because to this can happen. I would have to leave Lalín and maybe Galicia to study in a dancing studio. So while I can, I will continue dancing for many years, because with the dance I have grown, it has helped me in bad times and has known how to thank me for the effort, the perseverance and the falls in each and every one of the actions I have had, which were not few in fifteen years that I have been practicing dancing.

My exchange to Hunstanton

I will talk about my student exchange experience in a little village called Hunstanton. I visited Hunstanton when I was 16 with my classmates, I stayed there 3 months in a house with a family who lived there and with a friend and classmate called Martín. 

I remember that I have to get up very early for going to the high school, in comparison with my spanish high school it was very formal and modern, we had to spend 5 hours there but they were very enjoyable because we adapted very well to the class. In the afternoon we usually went for a walk in the town because there was not much to do or see. During our stay there we visited some cities such as London or Cambridge, these cities socked me a lot for their monuments and their expensive souvenir prices too.

Despite I was entertained and happy with my classmates and my family, once a week a receive a visit of my big brother because he was working in a close city called Stevenage, we usually picked the car for taking photos in different places of the village or for visiting nearby villages.

However, my stay there has negative points too, specially if we talk about food and weather. It was very hard to adapt to food costumes because they tend to add mayonnaise to all kind of food, something that for me is disgusting. Weather is another problem that we have experienced in this country, raining is very common in October and November ant that harmed our experience in someway because it limited us for doing certain things.

In conclusion, I would recommend exchanges to everyone, specially if you go to a country where they use a language you want to learn because it's the best way to practise and to learn it.

Hunstant high school

What I've learned from the Municipal Museum of Helsinki in terms of education

In the visit at the Municipal Museum of Helsinki I could understand how Helsinki has become what it is now, and the thing that surprised me the most was specially that once the Russian Empire was defeated and the Civil War was ended, Finland started to build a new society based in the education of all the people. It was very interesting to see how the classrooms were here years ago because if I compare them to the classrooms in Spain nowadays, there are no significant changes.
Although the museum shows how this city was evolutioning in many aspects, I would like to focus in the Educational System. I found in this progress an example to follow for other countries because until the 1960s, a date that is not so far away from the actuality, the level of education in Finland was pretty low, in fact, only one in ten adult had completed their basic education reaching an university degree. Nowadays, the ninety nine percent of finnish people complete compulsory basic education, a fact that can surprise anyone.  When we talk about improving our current Educational System here in Spain it feels like a really far and utopian future, but we can see from here that it’s not impossible.
Another thing that was very surprising for me about the museum was how didactical it is for the children. You can touch and feel everything, the old rooms and bars, the old toys... As a future primary school teacher, i found this fact very useful because pupils can learn about history through a museum in a fun and enjoyable way.

To sum up, I think that teachers should take in account that learning process has many ways of carrying out and they have a lot of different types of resources to do it. They should be in contact with museums and other teaching-learning places to achieve a productive impact on students, letting them acquiring new knowledge in a didactic way. Pupils should know that: learning is a fun and useful process, that they need to become cultural people in the future and take part in the society, and it is also very important for them to understand this because if they do not do it they will be demotivated in school and their curiosity will be getting lower while they are growing up. It is our goal, as teachers, to make students clear that learning is a life-long process and we all keep learning until the end of our lives; as Michelangelo said “I am still learning”.