My favorite picture!

I chose the picture of the girl that is dancing.

I did it because it makes me feel enthusiastic, spreaded by her face. It makes me feel able to live. It remembers me something, that I’m here and that is enough to be happy. Technically, it is an excellent picture too.

It was taken (in my opinion) during a popular fest, and I enjoy the passional colours, the magic atmosphere and the involving music.

For me the key of the picture is the confidence the girl sows in what she is doing, and for me, she is starting to live.

Keep Writing!

I have enjoyed reading your posts, and I hope you keep writing and participating on this blog. You are all welcome to keep it alive! Keep in touch, share your thoughts, experiences, jokes, anything, the important thing is that you keep practicing and that you keep in touch!

My movie!

It is so hard to realize this! Woody Allen wants me to help him to make the film of my life! When he called to tell me the idea I felt like in a dream. How could this happened? My life is not interesting for other people, I think, and I told him, but that is the most amazing part of the situation. My biographic movie is not going to be about what I have done. It will be based in future events! At the beginning, I didn’t understand him at all, but then, slowly, I realized it was a genial idea. What can be more visionary and risky tan doing the movie of a life that isn’t lived already?

FWP José Ángel

Losing a bet is always a bad notice. Even if you usually go to the sportsbook just for fun and not for the money, it is terrible anyway wen the “ticket charm” is gone. Now, I’ll write about one of the ugliest experiences a bettor can have: to lose a sports ticket in the last game.

It is known by almost everyone that in sports bet you need to it all the matches you have chosen for a ticket if you want to win. Is predictions are called “picks”. For each single ticket, if you have one mistaken pick you bite the dust. The unfortunately moment I’m talking about is when you lose by failing the last pick (chronologically)

The disaster is mainly caused by the internal desire of winning money. Furthermore, the more money is in game, the bigger is the disappointment you feel when everything is over, because, in final instance, you always play for money. When you put more picks in a ticket the probability decreases but the amount to win rises a lot. So every single correct pick makes you feel the double better. It is like climbing a mountain, so when you are very close to the top, the pain when you fell down is enormous.

The worst consequences of this horrible circle of ambition are mental, because you hope to win and except receiving the money, so you may start thinking what you could do when you earn the money. Tis visions are fantastic but very unrealistic and the result is a deep depression when you lose the ticket at the last moment.

If you are thinking about sports betting, I recommend you to control your emotions and those winning scenarios in order to avoid the impact of the tragic losing moment. Never forgive the Murphy Law: “Everything that can turn bad would be bad”. 

Well Done!

Thanks for your participation and enthusiasm!  I am very happy for the ones who dare to write and express yourselves in English. When you start using the language to communicate your thoughts, ideas, feelings, you start living the language! Enjoy the experience and benefit from it!

Mérid's fast and unsustainable urban growth

Traditionally the city of Mérida has been associated with characteristics as calm, human scale, ordered urbanization and a strong presence of cultural elements that creates a well defined local identity. However in the last decades an accelerated and disordered process of urban expansion started to act against the preservation of this characteristics and the good quality of life of the majority of the population of the city.

We can infer the gravity of this phenomenon by checking the numbers related to the expansion of the urban area in the last decades: the area occupied by the city in 1960 was of 3,631 has., by 1980 it had increased to 8,321 has., and by 2000 it had grown to 17,280 has. In the past the slower rate of growth of the city had been accompanied with the gradual appearance of the services that the population required, nevertheless in the last decades, characterized by this fast urban growth, the new neighborhoods lack some facilities as schools, libraries, etc. Also the quality and the quantity of public and green spaces have diminished in most of the new urban areas.

As this fast growth of the city continues, the lack of proper services in some urban areas has become more evident, and the differences between the north and the south of Mérida have increased. In addition, there are a growing number of residential zones occupied by the upper classes of population that are nowadays isolated of the rest of the city by great walls, contributing to highlight the social exclusion.

In terms of ecology and urban mobility, which are two of the main problems of today’s cities, this disordered urban growth worsen both, by making the trips longer and promoting the growth of the number of cars that saturates our streets. As more space gets occupied by automobiles the city becomes less green and friendly for the people.

We need to realize that the biggest issue of our time is to guarantee the sustainability of our ways of living, and because of that we need to act with a more rational approach to all things related with the growth of our city. Is essential to face this problem and understand that the consequences generated by the turmoil in the growth of our city lead to the erosion of our quality of life in near future. The time to act is now!.

All data obtained from the book “Huellas de Mérida. Transcursos y patrones urbanos”, by Ileana Beatriz Lara Navarrete (Biblioteca Básica de Yucatán, Gobierno del Estado, 2011).

I choose to be Mozart!

 Writing pg 126

What if you could be Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein or Mozart for one day?, Who would you be?

 There’s no way I would consider to be Einstein, because I’m not a scientific-oriented person. I would consider choosing Leonardo, because of the many interesting activities he was involved with. But in the end I prefer to be Mozart, because I like his music a lot, and also because he was a little bit mad and a very funny person.

There was a biopic on him called ‘Amadeus’ that shows different sides of his character: he was very passionate about his music but at the same time he used to act like a child almost all time. His life had some difficult aspects, like his relationship with his father, his debts and his premature death, so I would choose to be him in one of his happy days, maybe in the opening night of one of his operas (Don Giovanni’s look specially fun in the movie!).