THE CITY - NEW UNIT

On the second Thursday of the month of November, in the morning, we went on the beginning of a journey to discover new things we would never notice in our city if we didn’t pay attention. 11 of November was the date, and we started with 3 locations of our city: Baixa, Mouraria and Martim Moniz.

First we went on the train until we were close to Baixa, the trip was lovely and the view was, most of the times, nice to watch. We arrived at 09:09 and the minute we jumped out of the train we started taking pictures to all the things we could think of.

As we walk through the city, movement, contrast and busy lives made all of the photos of the day, beginning in every person who rushed through us on their cell phones, through the nice ancient ladies who wouldn’t mind talking with us all afternoon, and ending on homeless people who were nice enough to take some photos with us.

The main difference/contrast was, probably, the lifestyles living on those streets. Some people just pass by to get to work, others are visiting, many others don’t have no other place to sleep, and m

any of them, close to Mouraria live there all their life.

In side of those differences we can also see contrast on behavior. As we were taking pictures and talking to strangers, some of them were a little bit nicer and gave us a little of their time to talk with us and know their stories, most of them were ancient and local people. I guess tourists and workers don’t want to waste their time, because they were not the nicest people, ignoring us.

It was a really nice trip that revealed a lot about a city that, now, seems more that just a town. I think that only after being a tourist in your city, you can actually call it, your city.

Transactional Letter

Dear Sir / Madame

I am writting to ask some questions about your advertisement. I was dissatisfied with several points of information.

First, your advertisement said that's it's a programme for ages between 15 and 17 but what is the average age? You also mention that we are going overseas. Where? To do what? We also would like to question if it's always outside the country? And the skills you ask, which are they? How many people usually shows up in this programme? Does the free accommodation includes food?

I look forward for your feedback. I hope you have the time and patience to answer all our quesitions ass soon as possible because we are really excited about it.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

Yours faithfully, Joana Monteiro.

A Review - Book in English

The title of the book is "Unfinished Portrait" and ias a book in English that I've been reading for a while. The book is about a painter of portraits that meets a girl, Celia. Celia ia a woman that is almost comitting suicide and the painter convinves her into to doing her portrait not in colors as we thought but in writting. He starts talking of her childhood that's wuite interesting, how she was a religious girl when a child and the rest of her life. The book is a great book but it's not to learn English, well, in some ways is, when it's used different words to say something like they say "fond" to say they like something or "ought to" to say should or even "gay" to say happy, but that's not the common English, the words are always... old. However I am really fond of this book. The story is amazing.

The Debate

We had a debate and the theme of our teams, both against and for, was about the question " Is written press disappearing?" We were the for part and that was kinda strang because we were all against. But we took with the positive sight and as we had the arguments against we used them to create our own arguments searching information to counter the arguments we had befora. We all had fun doing this debate. We had to search information, help the other member's group and really have to behave like a team.

We had some arguments and we present some really cute cue-cards that I made from empty boxes of cereal at home. We really didn't need that much the cue-cards but it's nice having something to rely if wed on't remember something. Here are some of our arguments:

- It's much more confortable reading the news without having to buy the newspaper;

- The news is updated much more quickly on the internet then on the newspaper or written press;

-We can see several photos of the news we wanted;

-We can see news that happened years ago.

Here are some of my sketches for the debate(our theme), for the other themes of the debate, that were about the idea the media made of teens, and if english will disapear as main language...

The news Report

We had to do a Script for a news report that we had made up by ourselves. My group chose a bank robbery and we at first tried doing on film and we have everything filmed but we had some problems editing the film. So we perform our little show on class and it went well. At first I was a little nervous but I kept my calm and we did the little play correctly. I think we all learned a lot because we had to do it several times on film so we have really learned how to do a news report. You can check it here