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Saturday, November 30, 2013

NEWS ABOUT CHRISTMAS: A GINGERBREAD VILLAGE

In this time of the year everyone is starting to get excited for Christmas being very festive. All the shops have their Christmas decoration and all the streets have the colorful lights and of course, there're always surprises! 
This time has arrived for a Chef, Jon Lovitch, who has spent nine months to built a gingerbread village that he's planning to give it away in pieces after holidays. 
The village has 152 houses, 65 trees, and five trains all made with gingerbread. And it's all made one by one for this New Yorker chef! The big "cake" it weights almost 1,5 tons. It's declared as a World Record (from The Guiness Book of World Records). 

Jon is planning to start teaching gingerbread construction to share all his talent and spread the world with love and joy! 

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I think that this gingerbread village it's a christmassy version of Easter cakes made of chocolate. In that time of the year all the chefs go crazy with chocolate! It would be interesting to see it because there's a lot of museums that expose this kind of mangers or massive doll houses, so why not going to see one made of sweets? I would love to eat a house! Made of gingerbread, of course. What I know for sure it's that anyone told to Jon that he shouldn't have to play with food!


Friday, November 29, 2013

NEWS: A FLOATING CITY

If you're an adventurous person and you want to travel all over the world, you might not be as far as you thought for making it happen. The Florida-based Freedom Ship International  has designed a floating city. Unfortunately, it's not built yet. 

The floating city will have the capacity for 50.000 residents and  30.000 daily visitors. It's also going to have 25 storeys with every kind of buildings: schools, a hospital, accomodation (of course), bussinesses, parks, a shopping centre, an airport and even an art gallery and a casino! Can you imagine being in a never endless hollidays?
The giant ship is going to travel all over the world in a circuit that it will last two years

The company is trying to earn six billion pounds for starting to turn their dreams on but they said that they will need aproximately ten billion pounds! . It's really hard to know if they could make it possible, but they are very optimistic about the building process. The ship will weight 2,7 million  tones and  will mesure 4.500ft long. 


Designed by the Florida-based Freedom Ship International (FSI), the floating city is set to cost $10 billion and weigh 2.7 million tonnes - making it too large to ever dock.
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The Freedom Ship, concept pictured, is a mile long, 25 storeys high
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The ship would spend the whole time at sea, circling the globe twice a year.
The world-wide route
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I think that it's a good project to have it in mind but not to turn into a reallity. Do we really need a ship as big as that? A country moving all arround the world? It looks like a fantasy for me and it reminds me of a film that I saw when I was younger: Wall-E, because it was almost the same, the only difference is that in the film the ship was an space ship! This kind of projects I think it would be a great idea to implement them if we have any kind of "social-world-issue" like overpopulation.



http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2514936/The-incredible-mile-long-floating-CITY--complete-schools-hospital-parks-airport-50-000-residents.html

Saturday, November 23, 2013

ORAL PRESENTATION: FULANIS VS. CATALAN CULTURE

For finishing the first term about Stages we all did oral presentations. Meritxell Vidal (http://meritxellvidalfeliu.blogspot.com.es/) and me did one comparing our traditionals rites of passage with another foreign culture.

Unfortunately, our phone had a problem while it was recording, so there's not all our presentation, but I'll post the prezi and also the things that we said!



We showed images with our Prezi: it's a really good support!



The video finishes when we were about to talk about the weddings and funerals:

WEDDINGS:

Meritxell: The fulani girls get married at the age of ten, and the boys remind skuaa’be until they’re 20. Skuaa’be means handsome young men.
The man is allowed to have four wives if he can feed them. They can only marry people from their own clan. The couple has a short ceremony and they usually dance afterwards.

Me: Our weddings are like the rest of Europe, the couple can decide if they want a religious or a civil ceremony. A day after the wedding they usually go on honeymoon.

FUNERALS:

Meritxell: When fulanis are middle age they are called ndottijo ( older man who has wise because he has lived so many years), when a fulani dies they also follow the islamic laws. They bury the deceased as soon as possible and then they recieve visitors at home. It is compulsery that the visitors bring food during three days.

Me: In Catalonia, when a person dies the visitors can say some words to the family in the morgue. The day after, the family can choose between the cremation or bury the body.

CONCLUSION:              

Me: During this presentation we have discovered another way of living very different from what we are used to.
We found that their traditions are more serious and extreme. The most important rite of passage is to pass the step between child and young adult but in our culture this is not as important as being 18 or getting married.

Meritxell: And that’s all we hope you enjoyed it!



THINGS I'VE LEARNT FROM OTHERS PRESENTATIONS

1. How other cultures celebrates the fact of passing away, and also some particular funerals. I found it very interesting that there're places where some people have to design an unique coffin for each person!

2.The steps everyone should follow if they want to do a sweet sixteen party. Like choosing a theme and of course, the dress!


3.Gypsy weddings are very differents if we compare it with ours! They have a lot of "not very nice" traditions and they sing a lot and they do a lot of party!




Thursday, November 7, 2013

NEWS: CAN HORRIBLE BOSSES BE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH?

This article is about how can a boss influence in your health.It says that a horrible boss can make you feel stressed and it can cause a poor office atmosphere.

Well, that's something that everybody knows. It's easy to relate your stress to your boss. But now experts say that having a horrible boss is bad for your health. How can you imagine that your heart disease or diabetes can come from the stress that you feel from your boss?

The scientists of Ohio State University  proved that stress can cause a change in the gene activity in cells, so the cells fight an infection that you don't have. This causes infections and they transform into health problems. They also made an experiment taking blood samples from people who had stress and the characteristics were the same.

I agree about that. At first I would never thought that such things like diabetes or a heart disease it can come from stress, but now I think that it has logic. But maybe they need to investigate more about this. Although if you have a horrible boss you can't do anything for changing it, unless you quit your job!


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Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2488278/Horrible-bosses-really-ARE-bad-health-Chronic-stress-cause-lead-heart-disease-diabetes-experts-warn.html