Guerra comercial: Estados Unidos y China vuelven a imponerse aranceles mutuamente

De acuerdo con esta importante noticia publicada por la cadena de noticias CNN: "Estados Unidos impuso aranceles del 25% sobre otros 16.000 millones de dólares en productos chinos justo después de la medianoche ET del jueves y del mediodía en China. El impuesto afecta a 279 productos chinos, incluidos productos químicos, motocicletas, velocímetros y antenas".

En la noticia se explica que las acciones del gobierno Chino no se hicieron esperar al imponer aranceles del 25% sobre la misma cantidad en productos estadounidenses. Es una noticia lamentable la cual genera muchas expectativas acerca de cómo se verá afectado el mercado de exportaciones e importaciones entre China y Estados Unidos ya que de manera inmediata se han pronunciado muchas empresas acerca del impacto negativo que esto tendrá sobre los precios de muchos servicios y productos.

(Haz clic en el título para ver la noticia completa)

I see Fire

Ed Sheeran - I see Fire (Kygo Remix)

Special Adventure

Think in the best adventure you have had; now try to remember as most details as you can. How much do you remember? As Miss Kelsey say in the assignment sheet, everyone has had a special time or adventure in their lives. This special moment or adventure could be of any type. Experiences like this ones, are so special that we keep vivid memories of this moments for ever, because they leave a mark in our lives. I want to share with you one of mine.   

When I was eleven years old my father told to us that he had to go to a lawyers meeting in Zacapa and that he wanted us to go with him. About a week before our exciting trip to Zacapa my father sent a letter to the school asking for permission for my sister and me to be absent for three or four days. Have you ever wake up very early in the morning, so early that you feel nauseous and you are absolutely not hungry, you don’t feel anything and also you made everything with your eyes almost closed? That was how early my family and I woke up the day we arrived to Zacapa. We started our trip from Quetzaltenango (the place were I lived sometime ago) at 5:00 am, to Guatemala City.

I don’t remember anything about going to the capital because as soon as I got into the car I fell asleep. When I woke up we were getting out of the capital and start taking the highway to Zacapa. While we were on the car the heat was unbearable, when you opened the window the wind gusts, instead of being cold, were of warm air. The gusts felt like if you had a heater in front of you and when my father turned on the air conditioning, the sound was maddening so the situation turned very unpleasant.

After approximately seven hours of travel, we arrived to Zacapa and then went to a hotel named Longarone. At the reception we waited a little until the receptionist prepared everything for us to enter to our room. We spent a great time at that hotel, while my dad was on the meeting, my sister and I went to the pool. The water of the pool was cold as ice but the heat was so much that we didn’t felt it. I remember that that hotel was where I caught a lizard for the first time. I remember that I was getting out of the pool when I saw it on the floor and easily I took it with my hand. The lizard was brown and very small, about four or five centimeters long and it was very soft and its texture was very smooth. After a while I let it free near the place where I found it.   

I remember that another day my sister and I jumped on the trampoline of the pool and it was very scary for me because it was at a height of about five meters. Also that day I ate a delicious onion soup (it was yellowish and smelled not so good but it was perfectly salty and tasted delicious) and shrimp with garlic (the garlic smelled spectacular combined with the smell of that delicious, big, white with orange strips shrimps). That day was the last one at the hotel but we decided to go to Petén the next day.

At the next day, we woke up early, made the checkout and started a two-hour trip from Zacapa to Petén. We made a stop at the bridge in Río Dulce and the sight was awesome the deep blue and the green of the trees and vegetation around it combined perfectly. After a while when we were about to arrive to Tikal, we saw a few lizards on the pavement taking sun and as soon as the car get closed, they ran away. When we finally arrived at Tikal we spent approximately four hours walking through the grey, stone pyramids, watching monkeys and every kind of insects you can imagine. When we were returning to the capital we saw armadillos in the highway and at the sides. Also we stopped in a gas station and bought two soups and a bag of octopus gummies and after that I can’t remember anything else. At the next day I woke up at my grandparents’s bed in San Lucas.

That experience, I think, is one of the most special adventures for me, also it leaved a permanent print in my life and I expect never forget it.          

How Weather affects

Scientifically, weather is defined as “the state of the atmosphere at a given time and place, with respect to variables such as temperature, moisture, wind velocity, and barometric pressure”; but that definition is so boring so I prefer to call weather as the mood the day is and how much it wants to cooperate with you. Weather can affect you in many different ways. Sometimes weather can affect you in a positive way, for example, if the weather is rainy it can make you miss one day of school; but also weather can affect you in a bad way, for example, if you had planned to went to a pool but weather is stormy, you have to stay at home. Weather has many times affected me in bad ways, but also has affected me many times in good ways so I want to tell you about one of those times.

It was May 27^th, a Saturday; the sky looked horrible and my friends were about to arrive. It was a very important reunion for me because it was my birthday. I had planned this reunion about one or two weeks before it took place. I had made the invitations for the guests by my own. I made the invitations on a “101 Dalmatians” computer program that had pictures and themes about this movie, and the program was specifically to design invitations, bookmarkers, and stuff like that. I choose a picture of one Dalmatian, a background about bones (the classical ones the dogs carry on the cartoons), green font for the letters and a blue color for all the rest of the invitation. I printed about fifteen or eighteen of those invitations on blue construction paper and for the girls I printed the invitations on pink sheets of the same paper.

I had to organize my birthday spending no more than three or four hundred Quetzales. So the place I choose to celebrate my birthday was the celebration hall in a famous condo called Xelagardens in Quetzaltenango because my parents had acquired the right to use it for free. It was a beautiful place with one medium size pool and a Jacuzzi both had very hot water and a beautiful blue mosaic floor. It also had an L-shaped building, which was two floors and in front had a maroon fountain. Also it had one big garden with a lot of white flowers and green plants. The entrance of the condo was constructed in a colonial style (like the old buildings in Antigua Guatemala) and the streets were made of river stones.

The big day came but as soon as I woke up I focused my sight, through the window at the left side of my bed, on this gray, dark, grumpy cloudscape. I didn´t care about it and trying to had a positive thinking I took a shower and then, put on my favorite cloths but the weather didn’t seem to get better. I watched the clock and I was late, so my mom and I got into the car and my mom started driving. When I finally arrived at the condo there was one guest waiting at the entrance. As soon as we started to play, the weather seemed more and more stormy. I started to pray God in my mind for him to make the sun appear and the clouds go away. When my third guest arrived (and the last one because anyone else appeared after, and I think that was because of the weather), the cloudscape didn’t look as stormy as the beginning of the day.

 Because the weather looked good, the first thing we did was getting the four of us, into the pool and it felt incredible because the water was very hot but we didn’t felt it because the air was very cold. Then, we came out of the pool and walking about ten minutes we arrived to the soccer field but it was closed. Next, we returned to the hall and ate the three pizzas and because we were just four, we ate as much pizza as we wanted. Finally, when we came out again to play soccer in the garden it started to rain, but fortunately it was time for the mothers of my friends to came to pick them. So remembering that day I can conclude that that day I was very lucky because the weather wanted to cooperate with me and affect me in a positive way.

Someone Significant

I think that everyone found someone significant at some moment in their lives. A significant person has a great influence on the life of the person that considers him or her this way. And do you know what makes someone significant? If the answer was “No”, I think I could say that is the fact that most of the time the significant people are really good in what they do, they are natural leaders and also because you care about them and they care about you. Depending on the attitude, values, personality and habits of that significant person, he or she could have a positive or negative influence on the other person or people lives. Throughout my life I have had several significant people but I want to talk of one in specific.

“Muy buenos días mis hijos” is the phrase she usually use to greet us when she come to our class. “Desconozco esa información” is another common phrase she uses as an answer when she doesn’t know the answer to one of our questions. Gradually she decreased the use of these phrases because some students tease her (but no in a rude manner). Another thing I can say about her is that many times if she doesn’t know an answer she leaves us as homework to look for the answer of that question.  I could say she is the greatest social studies teacher I’ve ever had and she became one of the significant people in my life since last year when I first knew her.

Her name is Veronica Jimenez and I don’t know biography facts about her life (logically) because I’m her student. Miss Vero is extremely intelligent and she knows a lot of things about history (notice that usually she doesn’t use any book to teach us!).  She likes to teach us social studies in a very entertaining way. I don’t remember that I liked this subject so much as I do now.

She has wavy brown hair, and if I remembering well she has blue eyes. She is average height and has a normal body complexion. Another thing is that she has this interesting accent and the perfect tone and volume of voice to keep everyone interested in the class also she has an excellent lexicon which she likes to use. She says she likes coffee a lot but that she tries to not drink so much coffee as she was used to. She is very strict and most of the time serious but no angry, she likes to laugh at some of our jokes, she is very funny and even sometimes play jokes to her students, for example the one she played at a girl from our class sometime ago. The girl came to the class early and asked to her if she may go to the bathroom and Miss Vero said “yes”, the girl leaved and when she came back Miss Vero closed the door and said that she couldn’t get into the class and that she will take a report for being late. The girl went worried and upset and after some minutes Miss Vero opened the door and explaining to her that everything was a joke  every student (even the girl that was tricked) start to laugh.

She likes to teach us using photo-essays, because it makes the class more interesting. She use (sometimes) interestings mechanisms to make clear her point about something, for example, the time she made everyone to stand up and kept like that with all our stuff; next, she said she wanted all of us to copy what she was saying, but she was dictating one hundred per hour. The rules were that no one could move a little; no one could speak, laugh or make noise; and everyone had to use different color pens to write the titles, numbres, etc., but the most scary thing was that that exercise was our quiz. One by one a lot of people started to move or make noises and Miss Vero said that those who had made any of these things had lost the quiz. Finally, when a lot of us "had lost the quiz" she explained that she made that execise to give us an example of the bad working conditions during an important period on history.



Parque Centenario



She likes to tell us anecdotes about some themes she teaches to us like now we are seen the armed conflict in Guatemala. For example, last Friday she told us that while the internal conflict was taking place, the October 19^th she came to a speech given by Oliverio Castañeda at the Parque Centenario in zone 1 and after he gave his speech Miss Vero told us that she leaved from there with her friends and while they were going on bus they listened on the radio that Oliverio was just murdered. After telling us her anecdote, she started to explain us everything about the internal conflict and the reasons why the anti-communist army murdered Oliverio.  By anecdotes like this one the class turns more interesting and things like this one are the reasons why I like so much this subject and why this teacher is a significant person for me.

Personal Rituals

I think that people in the entire world have a specific ritual to do when they develop a certain activity. For example my father usually comb his hairwitha black comb before sleeping and neither him nor I know the reason why he do that (pretty funny don´t you think because he is going to bed and anyone is going to watch how is he combed). Another example about a ritual is that my family is used to pray before eating breakfast, lunch and dinner; also almost all my family members are used to pray to bless someone at his or her birthday. All these activities are rituals that people do because they get used to, also because they have learned that help them in certain ways or simply because they feel good by doing them.

For this entry I am going to describe you one of my own rituals. I want to tell you the way I study for tests because I develop this activity in a specific ritual; if not I feel I don’t catch the information as well as if I follow all these steps. First of all, when I come home the day before tests I try to eat breakfast like a turtle and also I force myself as if I put chains on me to not watch TV while eating because if not I spend a lot of time watching it as if I were Hypnotized. Second of all, I take out my notebooks  and books of every subject and put them in blocks on the dining room table because I prefer that place to do any type of homework. My notebooks are different colors depending on the subject. For example I use the red ones (the red is so intense as a cherry or something like that) for physics and math, also I have black and blue ones and they are for the other subjects.  For you to have a picture of my dining room (and know the reason why I prefer that place) I want to describe it briefly. It is a room of approximately 3.30 meters width and 3.90 meters large with cream white color walls and a floor of almost the same color; at the bottom it has a medium sliding window with white frame and at the left side it has a door of the same characteristics and both have transparent white curtains. In the left corner is placed a wooden table that has a very thick glass on the top (it seems as unbreakable but trust me, it can be broken as a glass if you don´t take care of it)  and also there is a set of four chairs made with a kind of leather which is very soft andcomfortable, and wooden legs. The chairs are very comfortable and because the room has the door and the window it is one of the most enlightened rooms of my house so you can spend hours in there without turning on a light, so that are the reasons I like to do everything related to school in there. The third thing I do is to choose the easiest subject to start and I set the timer from my mother´s cellphone which has the Huggies ringtone programed to sound when the timer stops, and set it for an hour. When the whistle at the beginning of the song starts to sound I am ready to get out of my house to play with a ball, run, watch TV or any other entertaining activity, but I have to do any of these activities for only half and hour. Next, I went to the kitchen and slice a fruit (I usually pick a delicious, red and juicy apple or a green sweet and juicy pear) or bread (I prefer a crisp crust baguette) or carry a little bit of junk food (the classical fatty and yellowish potato chips with ketchup) and a glass of cold water or any type of sweet and colored with a bright color juice, to the dining room table and start to study the second easiest subject. While I am studying, and trying to not take off my eyes of the book or notebook, I took a piece or a little bit of whatever food I have in front with my hand and I can feel those textures going directly to my mouth, and eat it trying to prolong the incredible taste Ihave in my mouth; for the liquid if I want to take a drink I stop, I take the glass with my hand and feel  how cold it is and wetting my hand with the kind of breeze it has on its surface because of the low temperature caused by the ice, and then I continue studying. When the acute whistle sounds again I repeat the process of doing any relaxing activity, taking food and a drink and set the timer and studying again until the next break. But If for any reason I don’t finish studying one ofthe subjects in the hour I set on the cellphone´s timer I use another hour or half an hour to finish it. When I am studying the third subject I come to my room which is like the dining room (in space and colors), lie in my bed with two pillows soft as clouds to support my back and listen classical Mozart music (I have four CD´s of this music so I can choose different songs every time I study), while studying the last subject because it help me to concentrate better and also because I like a lot those high notes going up and down in every song. And that entertaining routine is my studying ritual.