Santa´s present

December brought cold, of course, but the umbrella and the sunglasses should have been with you always, it could be hailing and the second after just a hurricane or a lovely sun heating your face.

An interesting fact about Bournemouth is that you can not be sure where the city ends and the next one starts: there is Poole on one side and Christchurch on the other. That month's trip was to the second one. There´s not much to see but two shocking places: the ruins of a Norman castle (the origin of the city) and a big church close to the river bank where we enjoyed the practice of the Christmas concert.

I remember with special caress the party with the department mates and each one of the games. I remember the three farewells to Aalto, the social work students on an internship in my project, as if we shouldn´t say goodbye. I remember the festive mood on the streets making me fight with insomnia.

And let´s talk about that, it´s not just that they really like to wear horrible jerseys with Christmas decoration, or the postcards placed in long corridors everywhere where you can basically buy something, it´s also that on the 26th, bank holiday, there are no trains because Santa is using them, or that the self-pay machines talk with you using his voice asking you about how are you going to celebrate those days. It was a really interesting cultural experience.

On the 24th, I went with Ádám to Salisbury. It´s a city we really like and there was also a Christmas market, was enough to take the bus and enjoy the city. However, some places were flooded because of the river and the market wasn´t really big and original. The good point of that was that he bought a watch that was going to use to cook, he said, but...

There was a huge sun on the 25th but without heating. Santa Claus could have given us some coal saying that wasn´t happy with our behavior but was crueler, and so with the poor insulation that you could feel the wind with the windows closed, he decided that it was the perfect time to have the heating broken on a bank holiday, that wasn´t the kind of gift we were expecting... We went for lunch at our organization and was emotional to be there with those people and receive the red hat. In the afternoon, I went for a walk through the beach before coming back to the freezer that my bedroom was becoming.

I returned to Spain on the 26th after a rainy morning in London. I left Ádám leaving on the kitchen to have some heat from the oven. That wasn´t really bad for all the things that were going to happen in January.