1986 - 2002

Recently, I have spent some days in the place I grew up before I moved to Catalonia: a village called Santa Cruz (Lians, which covers an area of 6.63 square kilometers - 2.55 square miles - and, as of 2014, it had a population of 9,900 inhabitants).

This village is located in the municipality of Oleiros, which in turn is located in the province of A Coruña (Galicia).

There they have one of the most beautiful environments I have ever seen in my life: The Santa Cruz Castle.

The castle is placed on a small island in the Ría of A Coruña, which is reached by crossing a wooden footbridge. This bridge was built in the early 2000s in order to permit easy acess. Prior to that, one depended on the sea: while the low tide allows walking on the sand, the high tide only narrowed the options to either boat transport or swimming.

Running around the island is a promenade offering a magnificent and unsurpassable view of A Coruña city, as well as of the village of Santa Cruz and its small port, which you can see on the picture above. Below, you can observe the castle and the low tide:

Read this post in Catalan.

Vegetarian

Not long ago, I wrote an entry called "Books, Mayim and Vegetarianism", in which I mentioned that for this year's World Book Day I was given as a gift a Mayim Bialik book called "Mayim's Vegan Table".

This post, though, is not going to be about that awesome book, but about how I chose a colorful and tasty life as a vegetarian in 2007.

At age 9, I learned at school that vegetarians are those people who abstain from the consumption of meat (red meat, poultry, fish, seafood and the flesh of any other animal), and may also include abstention from by-products of animal slaughter - By the way, I do not intend to be bitchy, but all of you who eat a plant-based diet including fish and call yourselves vegetarians need to stop it: the term for you is pescetarians. Remember, please, that vegetarians do not eat animals.

Respect Yourself

In times in which you do not seem to achieve what you want, remember to be grateful for what you already have.

Do not concentrate on what you do not have yet: it will make you unhappy.

Instead, take some time to look inside of you and around you; it may not be much, but it is quality that matters.

And last, but not least, remember that you will always have yourself, so you better respect yourself: