The end

They say all stories have an end. I am not completely sure, but I do know that this story had one.

The stories from Mostar have ended, even though Mostar is more than ever in my heart.

Though I am one of those who always have said that life in a UWC never ends, and I keep thinikng we are right, one has to understand that, however, it does not continue being in the same way.

Now there is a trunk so full up of memories that it seems a black hole, prepared to swallow one if one is not careful to say: no! life keeps being as marvellous! and the world is still full of things, little things, and bigger things to discover.

Today some tears appeared while reading a brief comment of a first year, a comment that made me dive in an ocean of smells, sceneries, streets, rooms, corridors, faces... that made me remember those last coffees with the beloved ones and with the ones I did not have time to love enough.

This is one of those experiences in which any word would say too little.

That is why, now that this adventure has ended for sure, we will be able to taste its juice in the already written in this blog...

or in the thousand things that have been left to say, and that perhaps will appear randomly at the new world that is beginning: Edinburgh and its university, and its theatre, and its people, and its sky...

Històries des de Mostar will soon stop being: www.neusrodeta.blogspot.com. But it will not disappear, it will only pass on to another domain.

In this direction, soon, you will find Snijeg u Edinburgh (Snow in Edinburgh in bosnian/croatian/serbian)

En aquesta direcció, prontament, trobareu Snijeg u Edinburgh (que en bosni/croata/serbi vol dirNeu a Edinburgh).

Nothing else,

thank you to all of those who, by internet, phone, letter, or tangible presence, have accompanied me in this wonderful journey

"When a door for happiness closes, another opnes, but sometimes we look so much time at the one that closed, that we cannot see the one that just opened in front of us."

Photo: flags in front of Musala residence. Don't you see mine? The Little Prince's rose.

A while of my new age

0 o'clock and what was I doing?

Drinking carajillo* in a bar while learning a bit of hebrew vocabulary (not that I got to learn much anyway).

*Carajillo: coffe with rum or cognac/brandy

And, of course, waiting. It seems we all have to wait since nobody seems to be able to be on time. But it is more pleasant while doing something else, it keeps away the anxiety, frustation and the possible anger for being made to wait.

What do we do now? Wait. Yes, but while waiting. What about hanging ourselves?

Yes, that means Godot's lines are still in my head, for the desperation of the ones by my side.

Finally my friend came, but nothing to be done. Not much in the mood, and even less since all people around were at least 8 years older and I knew non of them. I even met a friend of my father and the parents of some old classmate.

The concert wasn't like it was something nice to be heard, I'm not that much in heavy lately...plus the singer was quite an enthusiastic one, and he approached me (dunno whether encouragin me to dance or what). It's not like the sweat and the cow piercing on his nose was the nicest thing. But at least he played the tambourine every now and then, which gave him certainly a point not many heavy singers can be proud to have. (LOL)

I kept checking my phone every now and then. Had not much to do apart from drinking my bear and chat some random words to even more random people.

You always hope to get some sms on your birthday. Like some years ago, when they arrived even some seconds before it was mid night.

Nothing now.

I wonder whether that just lets me see how much distanced I have gained from people here. Though it's not like I cared for birthdays being an essential of one's life, but they certainly have a point of it.

Guess it is the feeling of being rememberd, being cared for, being important enough to spend 0,15-0'20 cents in a sms? Ha (sorry: Ja).

Not that I reminded anybody. True. Didn't even consider it, to be honest.

Difference being only that now I am right when I say I'm 19 (lately I said that right away and had to correct myself again and again).

"Things are not about how they start but about how they end" I was thinking at some point, looking either at my beer or the weird band playing. Guess I tried to give still a chance to my birthday-day. Then I thought "well, that's wrong, they're actually about what you learned of the experience when it comes to and end".

Learn that:

-life keeps going on.

-smiling still makes people happy (or a bit less sad)

-cats in Spain can shout as much as Musala's

-there's never enough time to give all you beloved what they deserve

-blabla

and that Godot didn't.

No.

He didn't come

yet.

Whose life's worth more?

Perhaps that's not the question.
Is there such a question, when there shouldn't be any answer?


A lot for an evening conversation.
And I must admit it would be a lot even for a whole life.
Lucky me.
Lucky most of us.

Però ens seguirem queixant...
[A lliure interpretació]

"Happines only real when shared"

"Into the wild" is a movie that reminded me on the importance of sharing.
Putting aside all wishes for real human truth, the only thing that comes along as a realization is the need for people.
People to love, people to be loved by, people to take care of you and to be taken care of...
People that can smile back at you, scratch your back and make you tea.
People to hug, to kiss, to do everything you wish
from hiking mountains to sharing a fork in Musala cantine.

And forgive,
forgive because there's no sense in living with hatred. Not if you hope for happiness. And I'm not underminding here how difficoult it is to forgive... but it must be done, now or later... and then God, the FSM, nature, or simply the bottom of your heart, will open up the sky a bit more for you.

And family
Familia.
La de sang o de campament
la d'un uwc o d'amistats.

I am scared, frightened, anxious...

250 words never frightened me so much.
And they are supposed to judge who is going to be the best candidate for the graduation speech out of these 250 words.
I wish I could even be able to put myself into a million of them.

I am incredibly happy that somebody thought of me as a valid representative, as a shaking smile with legs that could be reading, on a graduation ceremony, a speech that should represent each one of us, UWCiM '09 generation.

Nevertheless, or perhaps right because of that, I am so bloody scared.
I doubt whether I can make it, I seriously doubt whether anyone could make it. And still, it has to be done so… why not give it a try?
The feeling of partial truth terrifies me though. And if I am not even able to talk for myself, how would I be for everybody?
Plus, I know I won't be taking everyone in, for my energy and happiness will perhaps forget about those who silently cry waiting the day to leave this place. Perhaps those shouldn't be taken anyway…
Oh, what an ignominy. Everyone counts in here, everyone makes this place what it is, everyone has a presence that cannot be denied.
And I would be lying if I neglected those who lost the faith in this, since they are the ones that make mine stronger.

I don't think I should be writing this. It confuses me, and I am confused enough. Sleepy, too.
Always leaving important things for the last moment.
I have too many things to say for 250 words, for 250 words written late at night, when eyes start turning off by themselves.

I am afraid of not saying nor putting into words the best of myself. However… who can? There is always something else to improve. There is always something else to learn. There is always something else to make you considering shutting down your eyes forever; as well as there is always something else that keeps them awake, longing for new smiles.

I, me, myself i jo.

Bottom: depressed Neus. A qui quasi no li queden forces per aferrar-se a res, que està a punt de caure a l'abisme, que està mig difuminada, que té un inmens pes a sobre.

Right: over.reflexive Neus. Qui de tant pensar perd l'equil·libri i corre el perill de caure. Qui es fa menuda fins el punt que de vegades pareix que ningú la pot vore. Who alienates herself so much that it seems she forgot what it was to laugh.

Left: relaxed Neus. Qui es pren la vida tranquil·lament, sense preses... però sense pauses. Qui comprén que no val la pena exasperar-se per estupideses, somriu a cada moment i només "busca lo más vital".

Up: happy and cheerful Neus. Qui és increïblement feliç. Qui es perd en el seu món i vola entre els núvols. Per això de vegades la gent només li pot vore els peus, i encara gràcies!

I'm getting indignant again

"A falta de investigaciones completas en algunas provincias, el balance es estremecedor: 129.472 personas murieron a manos de los fieles al dictador (entre 1936 y 1939 y durante la posguerra), mientras que 38.563 fueron asesinados en la retaguardia republicana. "

from: http://www.publico.es/espana/actualidad/168709/memoriahistorica/garzon/guerracivil

As fore me, it is not a question of who killed more people, who is more to blame due to the lives they distroyed...

this was about some bastards destroying the path we started to walk towards a better country.

Freedom, equality, respect, tolerance... tot a pastar fang.

Sometimes I tend to believe that people that still support the coup cannot have a propper brain. I imagine it full of worms having a party.

The shock doctrine

Individu desinformat
fàcilment manipulat.

De cor fluix.

"In 1989, I was working in Londond on a story when suddenly I heard the news that the Russians were planning to make Berlin an open city. So I got on a plane. When I arrived in Berlin many people, young and old, were attacking the Wall with stones. The woman in the photo was shouting, 'I hate it, I hate it'."
Harry Benson

I m'han entrat ganes de plorar.
I hate it too.
I hate everything that hurts people's hearts, everything that breaks the world's soul, everything that divides us instead of uniting us, everything that generates the illness of ignorance.


També m'ha caigut una llàgrima després de parlar de l'educació en ma mare.
I després de conéixer a Toni Valesa, un antic amic de mon pare.

Dimecres, després de llegir-li a Cabedo dos contes de Jergovic, també. Pensant que massa a sovint ens oblidem del món, que a la comoditat de les nostres vides diàries no hi caben les desgràcies.

I dijous, pensant en el moment de tornar a Bòsnia... Si no hi tinguera tantes ganes, l'enyor se m'hagués menjat ja, fins i tot abans d'hora.


I aixina és, que jo acostumo a emocionar-me per tot, que sóc de cor fluix.
Fluix però fort.

Let the green sky hope for our inner destroyed buildings

You know? Sometimes it comes to happen that…
Well whatever it happens, the fact is that it happens, and you didn’t expect it though you desperately wished for it.
So what now?
Now, as Valon says, take it easy. Take it easy because as Kolores stated time ago and now you go spreading around: “don’t cry because it ended, smile because it happened”.
Exams are coming, and the situation is not exactly the best one to stare in front of the screen all day long, waiting for this little window to clink, notifying that you just received an e-mail.
Take it easy. Take it easy.
It is not about oppressing yourself as you were doing (and still may be doing)… but thinking too much, at least for you, isn’t good either.
Is it worth? Time will say. What you have to do now is just to hang around (and study). Days will pass so fast, and this is coming to an end. You yourself realized a week ago that you didn’t fully live your time here…
…so don’t let it happen again!

On the cupboard of the common room.

"On the cupboard of the common room" is the place where you can find all the cloths you thought you had lost.

It happens from time to time that you remember that such a place exists.

Today it happened that I saw an empty plastic bottle on the sofa, that was there since last week, so I decided to finally throw it away. When I got close to the sofa, I saw on the floor one of my thousands of colourful lost socks (maybe that's why I buy new socks every time I see cool ones).

Suddenly, a bright light lightened up in my mind... and I looked up.

Surprise! A mountain of white sheets, jackets, lonely socks, t-shirts and even trousers was waiting there for some charitative soul to notice it.I climbed on the sofa to fish for things that could be mine and... Outcome (a part from the sock I found on the floor):

·White sheets I washed long time ago and I completelly forgot to take them away from the drying-place

·My loved black baggy trousers

·My loved big black cut t-shirt

·Another black t-shirt that was also mine.

It should come the day...

It should come the day when it will be enough.

Enough of beating myself up

enough of not feeling self-confident at all

enough of comparing myself too much with others

enough of thinking people don't have reasons to love me

enough of getting better and then fall again in the same old story...

"There's nothing to lose, but our chains"

But what if we are not strong enough?

Even worse: what if we suddenly lost the strenght?

Life is not easy when you feel like crying almost every single day. When you're always tired, with lots of work to do. When you're kind of losing your social life, spending too much time alone in your room. The good part of not having full-time roomates is that you can have your own (and bigger) space, but it makes it so easy to get distant to world. And having such a calm floor doesn't help that much...

Tomorrow I'll work on theatre, physics, english, economics and spanish. Well, I think I rather would say: "Tomorrow I would like to work on" because, I don't know why, sundays seem to have less hours than any other day of the week.

The spoilt part of the land

Fingers are sliding over the keyboard.

It seems they have nothing to say.

No way!

Keeping, always keeping.

Deep, there in the bottom.

Hundred of millions of things happened. I'm still surprised about that, although what else should one expect from a uwc. Shaking one's beliefs, endless theatre crisis, sudden disappearance of self-confidence, lying on the stage looking at the sky and talking to oneself, the return of Paca, Suissane, Italian ragazza...

It is not possible to have a normal life here... but anyway, nobody came here looking for one!

I think that lately I'm getting too much introverted... and I wonder when it's going to stop. I'm almost never feeling like party or going out, I'm even finding myself, sometimes, thinking that I wouldn't mind that much to be left alone in the world for some period...

Actually, I'm afraid of isolating myself too much, but hey, the other way round isn't good either. Heroic tension, that's it. ("Based on psychological term "enantiodromina". Like a pendulum, if our emotion goes to one side it has the capacity to go to the other. 'Black only becomes black when it is introduced'.") --> You see? Theatre was/is eating myself, and maybe that's why these days I find it so complicated to get into characters. Maybe myslef wants a revenge.

Suissane is taking me to the spoilt part of the land she's growing in... and Paca is getting so worried about it.

What's the weather like?

Vladimir - Hey, Neus, what's the weather in Spain?
Neus - Well... I guess sunny.
Vladimir - No, I mean, in yourself.
Neus - Mmm... I think my weather is like when it stopped raining a moment ago and you're sure the rainbow will appear soon... but it's still hidden somewhere.






Later on, eating bread with oil and salt, I've told him
"You know? I also feel a bit like a hedgehog."


Erizo!
De puntas pinchosas
damaging with dards
those who I love the most.
Erizo!
.
.
.
gris.




A ver cuando cuelgo la tela del arcoiris que aproveché de uno de los tantos paraguas que se me han roto.
Le dará alegría al techo blanco.

Theatre Presentation

These are the tree images I used for my Theatre Presentation. We had to talk about our expirience as theatre students last term.


The neutral mask was a kind of beginning for me. It was the expirience that started to light up the rest. I put myself in so many questions I couldn't answer that my mind erased all the preconvieved ideas about theatre I had before. It was exactly as this quote from a handout: "When a student has experienced this neutral starting point his body will be freed, like a blank page on which drama can be written... The neutral mask in the end unmasks"
I have to admit that before this term attending theatre classes, I thought that theatre was only about living stories. But then, by time, I learned that it is death if you pretend just to tell a story, instead of setting it up to leave the audience leave it. Theatre is more than just the facts of a story, and it's more than just the emotions of a poem.
Theatre it's both, it's even more!! In theatre everything is on stage: emotions and actions. The audience will take what they want to take and so you can not pretend to teach anything, only to make people think about it, so they will find their own way to learn.

This image is a poster I bought after Andersen's Dream, the theatre performance we went to see in Sarajevo, approximately in the midle of the term.
I used it in the presentation because it simbolizes incredibly well what theatre started to be for me. Both, the text and the image, are telling you to go, to go there and discover what the hell is that dark figure, what is she/he doing, what's the meaning of all of it...?
And so it was for me. I really started to love theatre, to enjoy each leson, to really feel that enthusiasm about all the things I had to discover. Days started to be mine!

I took this idea from Ines, early in the beginning of the term, when we had to draw a theatre expirience. I realized how it was fitting perfectly with my feelings about theatre: up and down, good and bad, pesimistic and optimistic, go and come... a game of opposites. Furthermore, the shape is like a heart beat, and that's also because theatre makes me feel alive.

You can also see lots of colours, as there are so many things in theatre to learn about. However, take a look! You cannot find a single colour which is not connected with the others, as you cannot understand something if you don't try to link it with all the possible things you already know. Even more, at the beginning the colours are not clear at all, but if you really keep on working you'll reach the center, where things start to get their whole sense.

However, that was not all. I went on thinking about this "graph" and wondered how it could end. Was it always going to be like that?

Maybe by constant work, it could get constant, in way!!

But then I realized how stupid it was, to get constant. First of all, becuase I cannot avoid the downs, they come and that's it. But, second of all, because I even don't want to. I don't want to be misanderstood, of course I don't like to beig upset or depressed, but downs make me think

about what is going wrong, they give me the strenght to keep on working, they give me more perspective and help me to improve. So then I thought this last draw could simbolize it better, and a down does not necessarely mean that I'm so depressed, but that I have so many doubts in my head that nothing is clear at all.

Commedia dell'arte!

This kind of theatre is all about making fun of human behaviour.

Everything is exagerated.

Your're not in love.... you die of love!!

You don't like money... you just can not live without it.

It's also about improvisation.

We just had stablished scenarios (where to go and when)

but the words just come and go

and it was

... just amazing!!!

Instead of dying of money, as it should be because of Pantalone (my character: an old man just worried about money, crazy about it, his aim in the pla is to get id of his daughters because they are spending so much), behind the stage I was dying of laugh.

Just lying on the floor, not being able to stand up... oh my good! HILARIOUS!

Our play was a version of the tale "The Emperor's new suit" (Andersen).

One of the moments I like the most was at the end. When I just went out in underwear (not woman underwear, of course, it was a grey tight pijama), thinking that I was wearing a good dress and Zanni said: "but he's only wearing underwear!!"

And so, very quickly, Brigella convinced me that actually, it was better like this...

nudity sells! and one of the aims of this century is sex!! so... all the audience was going to pay ME for seeing me kind of naked. So I went through the audience with a hat, begging money, and after that, I proclamed that

"when I was young, I used to be a rock star"

and then started to play, with all the characters, a version of don't worry be happy with lyrics of our play.

And people liked it, sooo much!

Photos:

1.final photo when the audience was leaving

2.the first scene, when dottores convince me that the best idea is to make a ball

3.lovers falling in love with chairs

4.dressing up before the performance!

First song

Ahir vaig acabar la meua primera cançó en anglés.
Ací la teniu:

There are no more clouds left to hug

there are no stars to dream about

there is no moon to sleep tonight

the light of your eyes is getting dark

and your soul is breaking down

there is no sunlight to light up

the shadows of your walk

stand up, wake up

don't you see this is not the way?

stand up, wake up

I wanna see you smile again

stand up, wake up
don't you see this is not the way?

when you think there's no solution

for your fears or for your loves

when you feel there's no-one there

to find you again if you get lost

I know you hope things to get better

but belive me they won't do

if you don't change your stupid manners

come on, it's all about you

stand up, wake up
don't you see this is not the way?
stand up, wake up

I wanna see your smile again

stand up, wake up
don't you see this is not the way?