Crossing a new Bridge

I'm leaving in two days and couldn't think of doing so without stopping by, not to say goodbye, but in a see-you-later way. From sunday on I'll be posting from Denmark, I don't know when, how or what since the only thing that I know right now is that I am leaving, I don't have the least idea about what it will be like. I'm all packed up already but still it seems like I'm the only one around here who is not nervous, yet everybody else seems to be. Some keep reminding me that if anything goes wrong and I want back, I definately can come back, which I would never ever do, I mean, when you go out there you know that bad things can happen as well as good things, I wouldn't just run because I didn't like what I saw, I mean isn't that what life is about? sometimes you enjoy easy life and sometimes you have to put up with difficulties. 

Anyway, I hope I will find interesting things to tell you about.

Happy New Year v.San Sebastián

11.50pm

It’s 10 to midnight and everybody has their place in front of the TV, some got lucky enough to find a seat in the couch but others have to do with just a piece of floor or the edge of the living room table. Counting and re-counting the grapes of each one’s bowls, and the little ones cutting their 12 gummy bears in half, thinking they’ll have an advantage over the others in the competition they think grape-eating is, but for their parents, preventing them from choking when the time comes. It’s almost midnight and all of us are already holding the first grape with our mouths open, ready to chew and swallow, chew and swallow for the last 12 seconds of the year.

First bell, chew swallow, second bell, chew… third bell, bite, fourth bell, fifth bell, sixth bell, seventh bell, still no time for chewing, eight bell, ninth bell, you start making space in your mouth for the other 3 grapes to come, tenth, eleventh, twelfth… this is when everybody jumps shouting “Happy New Year” and reach you from every angle to kiss you and wish you a happy new year while you’re trying to not die swallowing the 11 grapes you had left in your mouth (as if there were any more space in your stomach) and drinking the glass of champagne someone just served you. Making a toast together with everybody in the family, even the ones who are away aux Landes and who by means of skype share the moment with the rest of the family here present.

2011 is over, with all its good and bad aspects, 2012 will bring new challenges, unimaginable difficulties and unexpected changes, but of course it will also bring joy, but even a year older and 366 days of further experience, next year we hope to again swallow grapes and drink champagne together, as a constant in our lives to not get lost or taken aback by all the newness of the year that has now just got started.

Hey Charming

I really didn't know what to write but today just couldn't do without a post. Why? some may wonder. Others may already know that our dear friend and faithful reader of this blog, Bu, turned 20 just today. Being as she is an old friend of mine, the one friend that I've known the longest indeed, I thereby feel like I should honour this hell of a friend I'm so lucky to know and have the priviledge to share time and good and not-so-good moments with, but basically good moments since she is the kind of person that knows how to turn lousy moments and draw a smile in other's faces with her particular and odd sense of humour and fine irony.

I'll stop with all the flattering for she's smart enough to know how amazing she is (and way smarter in fact) and I don't want to spoil the experience of getting to know her by oneself to those who don't know her yet. 

So without further ado: HAPPY BIRTHDAY BU!  I hope you enjoy the good life (you know what I mean, well she knows what I mean) and keep working hard in your fashion project and don't get strung up by beating traffic lights!

San Sebastian Film Festival 2011

59th edition of the San Sebastian Film Festival glamoured, as it always does, the citizens of the small but charming city with amazing films and exclusive events from 16^th September to 24^th. As some of you, readers, may know I sort of took part in the festival as part of the youth jury, which can be translated as 3 films a day, some of which you may not like or even end up hating, none of your choice. It’s been almost a month already –I know, I'm dreadful, keeping you up to date- and I still haven’t come back to normal, maybe the ‘damage’ is permanent! The lousy part is that everybody is asking me to tell the experience and I really don’t know what else to say, and how else to say it. Hence why it’s taken me so long to write about this amazing experience in The Bridge, I wasn’t really feeling like finding another view to it. But The Bridge is worth the effort.

From all of the films I’ve had to watch I would recommend Take this Waltz, Silver Tongues and Wild Bill. I recommended many more in my blog but I’m not sure if some can be found in English. Anyhow, these 3 are the ones whose flashing lights still haven’t gone out of my head after all this time. In spite of all films being made by new directors, from where I was standing, they were worthy of being compared to the best. A film that I didn’t have the chance to watch was The Artist, but if I were you I would find a way to see it. I surely will.

Even if it is a Film Festival (‘film’ before ‘festival’), the atmosphere on the streets is more about ‘festival ‘ than about ‘films’, with the exception of the cinema lovers, actors, directors, producers,… that walk around the city.

During this intense week celebrity-hunting seems to be the official sport, the prize? Autographs, photos, kisses from celebrities, and the pride of being able to say that one saw this or that celebrity.

Dress code: be up to the red carpet, grown-ups try to wear their best clothes (often ridiculously when it comes to elderly people, especially women who think that some director will offer them a job in Hollywood, and I’m not making it up, true story); on the other hand, youngsters try to develop their “alternative” (don’t forget the quotation marks) look and try to be “original” (quotation marks…) and cool (quotation marks, please! And then there’s me looking like a hobo with all the clothes that my university’s dress code doesn’t allow me to wear).

All in all, it was a terrific experience and I will repeat next year if possible.

Un Café à Trois v.San Sebastián

It is really a relief to be alone at last, since it's the first moment I have for myself in the whole day. In fact, I am not alone and don't feel lonely at all, The Bridge is not something we set out for on owr own and I am honoured to set out on this amazing trip with even more amazing people, who are not in flesh and blood here but in some way I came here to be with them.And where is here? one may wonder. Spain. San Sebastian. Molly Malone -irish pub named after the fishmonger-slash-prostitute-slash-irish heroine for passing on syphilis to a considerably big part of the english troops in the ways we all know...-.

It is a new occasion but i must admit that the place is not new for me, but I chose it because the times when I've been here were always before partying, so this place holds for me this feeling of something fun happening afterwards. And I realised that I had never been to this place in the daylight. Hence why at 19:52 I went through the pub's first door into the small hall, deep breath and through the second door into the empty pub with the usual dim light. For a minute there I lost myself, I lost myself, Karma Police by Radiohead is playing at the moment which perfectly fits the dingy and obscure atmosphere.It takes quite long for me to decide where to sit, the place is so damn empty that for an indecisive mind like mine it is really difficult to choose. My final choice seems to have been done pretty much at random but I soon realise that it is just the place a person like me would chose -I'm too obvious-: in a corner, where not many people can notice me, next to the window so that I can see what goes on outside but in a way that the people in the street cannot see me, with my back to everyone else in the pub, writing in a notebook, apparently absorved in my own world -i guess the only thing missing is a banner explicitly saying "don't talk to me"-. I order a coffee because even if Fernando says that we're allowed to cheat in The Bridge, I'm the new one here so I'm playing "the good girl" (at least for the first days).

Molly Malone, San Martín St., SS

It may seem meaningless to the people who are reading this -and it might have been meaningless to me before joining this project- but I guess that Sophie and Fernando understand this sudden flood of excitement that one can get from just a pencil, a notebook and a drink. Right now I feel like a different person inside my own skin, I've got this feeling of agitation -and it's not just from the caffeine- that gives me this impulse of writing non-stop. It is such an odd sensation that I remember this morning as if it were a different day when I was scared as well as excited about this moment, thinking that I wasn't going to be able to come up with something to write about.

Still, while writing this -unfortunately or maybe fortunately I cannot write as fast as I think-, I got thinking about routine and how this is a escape from it, it is a quite regular topic in my thinking, because I find it absolutely necesary and at the same time nonsense. We plan our whole lives to have a future, building day by day what we want our future to be, but we really don't know if there will be a future, a tomorrow, for as far as we know every day could be our last. Anyhow, we can't live every day as if it were the last because we would have to start over every day from nothing. I personally have this odd love and admiration for routine but specially for breaking it: if there were no routine, we wouldn't be able to break it to make fun or relaxing thins, just as going to a pub, grabbing a coffee and writing just whatever that comes to your mind instead of doing the things you would normally be doing on a Monday Evening.

20:55 I should get going... class tomorrow...

A sip of coffee and good company are worth a thousand words

Getting warmed up

It all feels like a first day at school. You know there will be new friends and the ones with whom you used to play in the park will also be there. There will be some kind of homework, but unlike at school it will be a pretty pleasant task –and unlike at school I am truly determined to do my homework-. It is also said that there will be new things to learn. Hopefully, it is not school where we are heading so no naughty kid will bite your oversized freckled cheek –as if it were a muffin- take your snack from you or laugh at you.

It is this bridge that we are crossing and putting together these bits and pieces that otherwise would not have had the chance to meet. But you, readers, may already know that, because even if it is rather new for me, this bridge has been going on for a year now. It just took a small pause from its activities, as in the greatest theatre plays where the play stops for a while, people get out of the room and after some time it continues to entertain the audience with a new burst of energy.

The bell announces that the intermission is over.

People get back to their seats.

Lights go down.

Curtains up.

Everybody remains quiet to let the show continue and…