Antipodean goodbye
3 years, 2 months and 15 days.
The timespan between two flights: a tiresome one touching down in Sydney Airport ending the Kangaroo Route and the another heading for the Java Sea in just a few hours.
Three years can be hard to condensate, let alone recount. They represent a complex blend of faces, moments, experiences and lessons. Some good. Some bad. Some necessary.
I came to Australia days after graduating from high school, leaving behind what I called home for 18 years: friends, my mother tongue, parental warmth and restless curiosity for the world beyond it. What a decision that was, one of the best I will ever make.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Australia was then an exotic escape from the ordinary; a laid-back refuge for 6 months of English lessons and, if luck allowed, the perfect place to harvest a few amusing stories involving Aussie sheilas and booze. I was very young.
Spain: looping in tactical voting
“At times voting is just like funerals” – El Roto
Unhappy nation votes for change in the hope its woes will end. A very familiar tale lately incarnated by debt-soaked countries where technocratic governments and opposition leaders have raised to power in the midst of asphyxiating pressure.
Unsurprisingly, Monday’s headlines made Spain the protagonist of this politically bewitching tale, following the conservative PP party’s overwhelming victory. Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba was severely punished for Zapatero’s economic legacy giving Mariano Rajoy a parliamentary supermajority like no other candidate has ever won.
But there is more to this story.
