Having Fun

In the weekend our China final project team got together to finish the work. In a strange way, we had a lot of fun (or at least I did).

We were discussing a lot of articles on China saying things like "did you know that...." and thing like that. We were all in my dining room table, each with a laptop searching for information and doing work.

Of course there were some persons that occasionally went to Facebook to stalk other or that did other homework’s, but we managed to do a lot of the work. Another fun thing is that I made my guest (we were at my house) feel like we were in a starbucks.

I prepared some chocolate muffins and cappuccinos so that we had more energy and we just started discussing a lot of thing while drinking.


We did have our little problems, but nothing we couldn´t resolve. We are a very good team and we know how to resolve conflicts without making them bigger.

What I mean with all this is, I had fun doing this homework, I like knowing about other places and this project gave me the opportunity and the will to do so. You make things better if you like doing them.

Loveless Marriage

In China there are 3 ways to dishonor your family, and one of those ways is not having a kid. So what happens to homosexual people? They have 2 options; 1, they keep living their life and are very secretive about it or they marry a girl. Being homosexual in China is not very good seen, is not like in other countries where they are more open minded.

The government has interrupted a lot of activities done by homosexuals and closed locals of them too. So what they decide to do in order to be a good son is to marry some girl. The bad part is that they are both really miserable. The one that doesn´t feel love for his wife and the other that is trapped in a loveless marriage.

It is common for that type of girls to not know their husbands are homosexual until they are married. The girls feel miserable because their husbands don´t even look them in the eye and even less touch them so they have come to a solution. They created a site so they can support each other.

Is curious that they don´t divorce they just accept what is happening without questions. There are around 25m of marriages like this. I think this is so unfair, people should marry who they really want, and marriage should be about love. This partially happens because homosexual can´t marry between them so they should let them I don´t think there is anything wrong.

Errors of the USA

I saw an article of a very funny error of the government of USA. It is about a 5 or 6 year old boy who is registered as a terrorist. The boy, son of 2 normal Americans has a really hard time travelling in plane.


When he and his family want to travel they have to arrive to the airport 8 hours before because they make them a lot of procedures for them to pass. The government made a mistake and now his name is in the list of terrorist being search of. It is really strange how this happened, it didn’t explain much.


But it has to be really annoying to wait 8 hours each time you go, and some day you are going to get tire and decide better to stay at home. And now the kid is little but when he reaches 18 years and more things are going to get really difficult for him. I hope that the kid solve his problem before that.


So the government made a mistake and now a perfectly innocent kid is being treated as a terrorist when he wants to get out of the country. This isn´t fair, people shouldn´t be making this type of mistakes. I know there are hundred more cases that are more horrible but this was very strange so I thought it was interesting.

Paulette

There is a pretty famous case right know, the case of the missing now dead girl Paulette. This girl that was born with problems was missing, they thought that probably kidnapped and for a while the only thing you would hear in the media was about this girl Paulette. But who is this girl, why is she so important that the media only talks about her?

Well the answer is very simple; their parents are rich and influential. There are millions of kids being kidnapped in Mexico each day but this kid´s parents are rich and they decided to make this whole thing big. And other influential people couldn´t be happier about this, attention was being directed to other part.

And what about the girl? She was found dead in her own house, probably killed by one of the family members or maybe just an accident. Either way, the media won´t stop talking about her until they find the culprit, everyone is so eager to her more about the case. They give this a lot of importance; even in school one group did a debate about this case.

I don´t say its bad, but why give so much attention to this girl, when there are other kids being kidnapped or other cases that are more important and require our attention but the only thing we are hearing or wanting to hear are new things about Paulette.

Looking for Love

China has 22% of the world´s population, which means that there is a lot of millions of people there right? And even though they are a lot they have problems finding love.







China has the one child policy so they prefer to have boys and if they know they are going to have girls they can have an abortion so as a result there is a wide gap between the number of girls and of boys.

Girls don´t look for looks, they look for someone who can support them economically, that means that they search for someone with a job. Hundreds of Chinese graduate but only a few get jobs so; many of them are old and still living with their parent, that’s when the parents come in.

There is this big event in which parents with boys have a blue ribbon around their wrist and if you have a daughter the ribbon is red. Then around you there are a lot of cards with information and a picture and parents just go to other person and ask about his or her kid to see if they could be happy if they married.

So this event wouldn´t have to happen if China wasn´t so bad with girls, they are important.Going to a place like that as if it was a market its really sad and I fear is going to get worse each year.

China´s economy

So for the final project we chose China, well, I chose China because the other members of my team weren’t in class. I was really nervous because I didn’t knew if the country I chose will like them and of top of that we have to be ambassadors so if you don’t like the country your work will not be as good as with a country you do like.

When I told them what we did at class and the country I chose I was relived to hear that they liked the country. I chose that country because news about it are going out very recently so we have updated information and is interesting because they have a different political and economical system so it is always entertaining to learn something new.

In the homework of searching about their economy we were at one of the team member’s house with laptops searching for information, so if someone found and interesting article she will discuss it and then we saved the page to take information later. So we were all the time discussing things. In one part we laughed a lot because it said something like Chinamerica is heading for divorce, and one said, that is from a tabloid right? We worked hard but we had fun.

The most interesting part for me was when I learned more about the US dollars that China has. I though that China was really powerful for having that money and that US was having more respect for China because of that but I learned that it wasn’t convenient for China to change the money to any other currency or do other things because it will cause inflation. So overall I liked the research.

Shopping, an addiction

I remebered a trip me and my mom made to Paris. We were walking in the city when we decided to go looking at the big fancy shops. So we started looking and we found Louis Vuitton, it was big and really pretty. So we entered just to look and the first thing I noticed was that there were 2 kind of girls in the store; Asians and Indians.

The Asian girls looked fancy, well dressed and like businesswomans while the Indians (which were like 6 together) were normal, they were wearing a dress and underneath jeans and of course their head covered. The other thing I noticed was the huge amount of different scarfs and they were the perfect size to make headscarfs for the Indians, so it is very common for them to come here and buy this type of product.

The Asians bought bags the biggest ones they could find, I was almost next to one and the girl at the counter showed her a very big bag and the Asian said that it wasn´t big enough, so it didn´t matter the design just the size and the label. The Indians were happier and they looked at everything.

So we were tired of looking and we went outside and we saw a disgusting thing, a woman was asking a man if he wanted some services. And it was just outside the store! Then days later when we were at the plane, next to me was seated a woman, she had traveles everywere and knew a lot of things and I told her about the thing I saw outside the store and she told me that it was common. That Asian come to buy label things, they have their savings just for this and if they didn´t had enough money they will go outside and sell themselves.

How can a woman denigrate herself to that extent. Bags and all that are just material, how has society made us need this objects and it is just for the appearence. Also things get old and then you buy new things and its a never ending cycle that creates huge debts and makes people waste a lot of money. I don´t say buying materials thing is wrong, because I like to buy too, but you have to know your limits if you have your especial saving for that, ok but if its not enough just let it be.

Publicity in magazines, good or bad?

I was with my friends and they were watching a fashion magazine. It is normal in these types of magazines that you have publicity about many types of beauty products, especially perfumes and cosmetics. Then at the middle of the magazine you have super skinny photosphed models with a themed photo shoot.

Then my friend, a boy, said "Oh, I must stop watching it only makes me feel bad" (it was an image of a male actor). And then I started thinking about that comment, he feels bad because he doesn´t look like him but he is intelligent enough to not make anything risky to change himself but I can´t say the same about other girls.

There are many girls that struggle with self-image and they even buy the product that the model is selling just to try to be a little bit more like the model. But if you think of this in the economic point of view, this is very good.

Magazines get money from publicity in their pages and then girls want to be like the models and buy their products, and if they fell very motivated they go to the gym, so they buy a membership, then they buy weight loss products and when they are skinnier they buy new clothes so it’s all a market that is connected and from this point of view people feeling like my friend is very good.

But in the health point of view is bad because many persons are affected fiscally and mentally and in extreme cases you can even die. But everything has it bad and good things, it all depends on how you see them.

Chile, how does it affect us?

The other day I was having a class named critical thinking and the teacher mentioned what happened in Chile and everyone started talking about dead and stuff like that. And how sad that they even had a 2 earthquake and it is true so many people are suffering and they need our help.

But there was this kid who said, "Well, I don´t care it doesn´t affect me" and everyone looked at him, some agreed with him and others said that he was insensitive but he is right, it doesn´t affect him or me directly but it is not totally true because we are all connected in some way.

The teacher answered him and told him that maybe it doesn´t affect you but maybe some Mexicans had family in Chile and it can also affect Mexico’s economy. That was the phrase that catches my attention. If Mexico had some exchange with Chile, know it would be strained because Chile needs to recover and maybe we don´t get the products we were getting from them.

Or maybe we still get them but at a higher price and who knows maybe that kid like some of the things they export and now he can´t get it. So it is all connected, if only country suffers all the others are going to suffer too, maybe not so evidently and ones more than others but in the end this is a proof that we do need to help each other because we are connected and what affects other in some way it is going to affect us.

Does money buy happiness?

We have often heard the phrase that says that money doesn´t buy happiness but in some way is not true. Let’s take for example a family. If you want to survive you need money, because you need to buy your basic needs such as food, drinks and a place to live. You even need money to make your life happier, who isn´t happy when he or she gets something new? I know this has to do with capitalism but it still makes you feel good.

Even though I say this, you don´t need a lot of money, because the more you have the more you want and is a vicious cycle in which you are so absorbed in wanting money that you don´t even pay attention to your family. So everyone needs a balance in those aspects of their life. You need a job in which you gain more than enough money and something that you like to do.

To end, I want to say that we shouldn´t say that money can´t buy happiness because is not true, you need money, nothing is free. And the amount of money we need depends on the lifestyle of everyone.

Home sweet home

Last year I went to Spain to study for 2 semesters. When I came back to Hermosillo everyone was asking me how was it and if I liked it, well my answer was no, I didn´t like. Many think that is better to go study to any place, except your city (I´m one of those people) but going so far away made me think that it is more difficult than you think. Family was not a factor, my parents came with my and all my family lives in Spain.

But I really missed my friend and my comfort zone, especially my house and overall my room. It was difficult for me to adapt to my new room, I didn´t slept for the first 3 or 4 days. But knowing a city, another culture and a slighty different language. The first days of school when I had to adress a teacher I told them that, teacher, but they will just look at me and laugh, they told me to call them by their first name and to adress them informally that was very difficult, so in the first days I raised my hand when they were looking my way.

Also, there are some words that are different like the ones for pen, "pluma" and "boli" and many others. The reason I dind´t like it was because of the school, it was very difficult and I didn´t like the system. The people was okey, a little bit different from my friend but they are good people. One curious thing I remembered is that in my shcool at Spain there were more male teachers than females and in here they are more female teacher. Also that the groups are smaller only two per year and of 23 or 24 kids and there are more boys than girls.

The first days I wasn´t feeling very homesick but when I was 2 months away from returning home I was incredibly homesick, I felt stange, like I didn´t belonged there because it was all temporary, the house, the shool, my friends...so when I was home I was very, very happy that is why when people ask me if I would return I say no. I´m very grateful for the experience because it does open your mind and you learn to deal with different people and situations but there is no place like home.

Football

These days football is almost all you can hear of, forget about Haití the Super Bowl is coming!! I´m not very interested in american football, if you ask me of teams maybe I know 1 maximum and don´t ask me about players unless they are with a famous actress. But the interesting thing about american football, footbal or soccer and almost any other sport is that they are their own little world.

It doesn´t matter your skin color, unless is basketball in which they will automaticaly consider you better, or where you come from the only thing that matters is that you better play good and make your team win. These players, if you are good and in a good team, are paid huge amounts of money, some people think they are paid too much, and they also have money from advertaising.

They even have clubs of fans with millions of items of them, they are considered idols just like in a religion. In politics, well... some say that some games are paid, like they pay the other team to lose in purpose. I like normal football and when they say that I just can´t believe it and I can´t even think of my favorite team doing that (RM) but if you think it over, why not? In the end, football is about business, they want to earn money so it could be that one or two games are bought. What I think is often bougth its the arbrit.

But what I really want to say is that is awesome how many countries forget of racism and come together. This types of events promote turism and good relationships among countries, they are also a stress reliver, well not always because sometimes they get very exicted and if their team loses they get sad. But in the end the thing I like the most about sports in general is how they unite people.

Poors vs. Riches

Often poor people critices rich people because of their wealth and I have been thinking that they are very wrong, and instead of critisicing other they should act and search for opportunities. Yes, maybe I don´t know anything about that because I´m not poor and I don´t need to work put there was a TV show that really had me thinking.

The show in short was about super rich people that went to poor places for a week and they had to decide to whom they will give money to. The episode I saw it was interesting because it was an old man around his 50. He also wanted to prove in the show that you could survive with a certain little amount of money per day.

He said thet people were complaining about money problem saying it was too little but the truth is that they didn´t knew how to organise they money because they spent it in many little things without knowing. So it was interesting seeing the man do all sort of logic and simple things to save money, which required a little more effort. Of course, many poor people donn´t know how to save money because they don´t have the knowledge so like they say, we should teach them to fish not just give them the fish.

Which leads me to another thing I found interesting in the show. The people giving money,they didn´t give it to the people who was poorer but to the people who truly need it and could rise with that money. Like for example, a washing store who went to building for the clothes then wash them and give them back, the man gave money so they could buy a van in better shape. He said that the invested in something that really needed his money.

So, if you want you can. You have to take chances and look for them. Rich people are rich because they work and take opportunities. Some have connections or are sons of rich people but money runs out, so if you want to have money you have to work for it.

Abortion

So, I wanted to talk about abortion. I know there is one post about abortion but I wanto to say somethig first, I agree with abortion. I know many people will think bad about me or that I´m very mean but I think abortion is in someway is good. Why? because first of all is it the decision of the woman not of anybody else (maybe a little of the father, but in the end is the mother who suffers).

I hate when people say "You have to have the baby" because it is so easy to say, they are not the ones with the big tummy, and the back pains the one taht will not sleep in the night, change diapers and many, many other things so it easy for them. I honestly don´t care at all if a woman decides to do an abortion, it doesn´t affect me or anybody else so I don´t understand why they care so much.

They also say about adoption and things like that but, people look for babies, the younger the better. So there are many kids who stay in those places until they have enough age to go. And most of those people are criminals because they didn´t have a family. Other thing is that they think they are unwanted, which in most cases is true, so they grow sad. I know this will sound mean but, if you don´t want them is better to get rid of the fetus while you can, we don´t need more people to use resources.

They are some cases in which the abortion is legal, one of those is if you have been raped, I will be really sad if I have to be 9 months withe the product of that horrible moment of I man I probably don´t know and have to be remainded of it each second of each day and then when the baby is born to have to see the face of that person, I know that the baby has no guilt, but I´m pretty sure the mother will not love that baby the same if the baby was born with the person she loved.

Other case is if some of the two are in danger. I´m not a mother, so I don´t understand why sometimes they decide to save the baby instead of themselves. I mean, you will miss more the mother, the one who have known for years, the one that has friends and family not the fetus who nobody knows. So it is better to sacrifice the fetus in that case.

And the last case is if the baby comes with a malfunction or some kind of disease. If the baby is born, it will suffer because you like it or not the baby will not have the same type of life like other kids, in many ways the baby will be discriminated and will not fit very good in society. I know that there are some teenagers that they don´t protect themselves and then decide to have an abortion, that is wrong but again, its their decision, their life and their conscious so lets just leave those people alone and focus on other things.

Culture

In the activity in which you gave us to choose 5 options there was one, the one I choose, about Culture. I agreed with all except for the part in which it said that in actual times, culture does not evolve.

I highly disagree with that concept because all of the cultures change or in other words evolves. Our culture is not the same of 100 years ago so the culture does change, not completely but it does.

And at first I agreed with the comment but when I gave it a deeper though I realized that. It is also interesting how does the concept of culture changes, going from a form of agricultur information to a more complex concept that include many aspects of life.

It was interesting also the part that said about the social classes, in some way is true, you have to have money in order to learn somethings but also the statement is false because you are learning culture since you are born because you see your parents and often imitate what they are doing. I think that in a future the concept of culture will change because it has changed through time, so who knows what the concept will include or delete in some years.