She.

She walks to school among the palm trees
She uses the Smartboard in the A309
She jokes with her colleagues
Before the bell for the lessons rings
She enjoys cooking every day
And she listens patiently to everybody
She takes her students to the theatre on a sunny morning
And she goes to school meetings every Tuesday
She helps her son with his homework
While she corrects a pile of exams
She speaks English in front of the class
She comforts a teenager who is crying
Because he failed and exam
She is a hard-working woman
And she is a sensitive person
Maribel is a million different things
Because she is a teacher

(My version of the poem She, by Annette Kennerly.)

Recipe

Thanks, Maribel, for telling me about this website. I'll have to try the recipes now!


Italian Food:How To Make Vegetable Lasagne With Aubergines

Looking for Saul Muller.

When my father was doing his military service in the Sahara (which belonged to Spain then) one day he found a bottle on the beach and it contained a letter. It was from a man called Saul Muller, from Israel. My father answered the letter and Saul sent him a letter in Spanish (which I have now in my hands) saying he has a 17-year-old student who lived in Kfar Shmaryahu. He spent a few years in Colombia when he was a child and that's why he learnt Spanish. He sent the bottle on his way back to Israel and he calculated it had travelled 3,000 kms. till my father found it.

That was 1969 and finally my father lost contact with Saul and has never known anything else. So now I'm sending a bottle to the modern oceans of internet and see if he appears or someone can tell me where to find him. My e-mail is [email protected]

The French say...

speaking English is dangerous!



I hope it is not true!

Elche.

This is Elche, where I live. That's why I chose the nickname "Amelche" (Ana María from Elche) and the palm tree as the photograph for my blogger's profile. It's very hard to find a corner in Elche where there are no palm trees. That's why we got the UNESCO's World Heritage award in 2000: as you can see here

These photographs were taken last year at the Museum of the palm groves in Elche. It used to be a private orchard till the Town Council bougt it a few years ago, refurbished the house and created the museum. I remember once I went there to buy some dates for a friend from university who had asked me to buy them for the family where he stayed in Sheffield, when he was an Erasmus student there. The old lady who sold the dates told me: "When I was young it was quite an adventure for a woman to go on your own to Alicante (one of the nearest towns) and now you girls go abroad!"

I had been in the house buying dates but I had never walked in the orchard till last year, when I took these photographs. This is the entrance to the Huerto de San Plácido (St. Placid's Orchard), I think it's a very appropriate name for it, due to the quietness of the place.

There wasn't anybody there and I had left my mobile phone at home charging the batery. In that moment, it was as if I had gone into an oasis far from civilization. There was an incredible peace there. The Arabs, who used to live here many centuries ago, would plant their orchards and place the water channels between the palm trees (as you can see in the first photo) so that the water was on the shade and it didn't evaporate so much. In Elche it is also typical to find benches made of palm tree trunks, as you can see in the previous photograph.

However, behind the palm trees there is the city with its buildings like the ones in the photograph. This park is situated in the heart of Elche, very close to the town centre and its busy streets. I dedicate this post to Anna-Lys, http://anna-lys.blogspot.com/, who asked me to write more posts in English and I promised I would. :-D

(This post in Spanish, although I have changed a bit the translation into English, here: en español.)

Piano Concerto nº 2.

I found this video about Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto nº 2 and what the pianist feels while playing it. I thought it was quite interesting, so I decided to publish it.

Love Leaves a Mark.

"Your mother died to save you. If there is one thing Voldemort cannot understand is love. He didn't realise that love as powerful as your mother's for you leaves its own mark. Not a scar, no visible sign... to have been loved so deeply, even though the person who loved us is gone, will give us some protection for ever. It is in your very skin. Quirrell, full of hatred, greed and ambition, sharing his soul with Voldemort, could not touch you for this reason. It was agony to touch a person marked by something so good." Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.


(Translation into Spanish here.)