Terrestrial animal

Christmas break 2023 By the end of September I asked my friend Jan to take me some place nice, some place I can get closure, some place I can leave all my demons behind. Jan suggested going hiking in Slovakia, I didn't think it twice. I booked my plane tickets to Czechia, requested days off at work, got some mountaineering equipment, and got ready for a life-changing adventure. The Prague astronomical clock is a medieval astronomical clock attached to the Old Town Hall in Praha. It was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest clock still in operation. On August 2023, I took my parents to Paris, and despite the city itself is objectively gorgeous, I found it disgusting in many ways. Praha has a similar style, but it feels completely different. It feels sober, clean, impressive, enlightened, old but modern, housing the cultural centre of central Europe for many years throughout its history. Walking the streets of Praha during ...

Victor Flores López was born in Hidalgo on July 28, 1956 in a poor family where all the members of the family had to be jacks-of-all-trades. He had always been the black sheep of the family, but that didn't stop him from being a good person. In 1964 his family left the state of Hidalgo to settle in Ecatepec in the State of Mexico. Don Herón, the head of the family, always hard-working and charismatic, despite his violent nature, was an important figure in the Santa Clara neighbourhood. My uncles and grandfather built many things: schools, houses, roads, to the extent that Santa Clara belonged to them, so much as they belonged to Santa Clara, despite them coming from a different state. Irma López Ramírez was born in the state of Mexico on November 10, 1959. Also from a poor family where all the members had to be jacks-of-all-trades. She was the eldest sister and from a very young age she had to mature prematurely and become the unofficial pillar of her family. Don Rogelio mad...

Members of the Flores López family are no debutants to the big city, after all, they had spent their entire lives in Ecatepec, the epitome of violent towns. Armed robbery? checked Scams? checked Extortion? checked Working at the convenience store involved lots of things that went beyond spending fourteen hours a day serving people. It involved being together as a family, but more so as co-workers. It implied that whatever our mood, we always had to smile to the costumers and, we always had to smile to our colleagues. The context of how complex the dynamics in the store could be included our individual issues, I was deeply in debt, my mum, my dad and my brother were having health issues, my brother and I needed to go to school, our egos were really big at the time, we had self-imposed and inherited expectations, we relied economically on the store, and there was uncertainty about the future. It was a fortune that we didn’t explode that often, deep down each of u...

Nunca me ha gustado extrañar, es un sentimiento muy complejo y complicado para mi. Remigio, Paco, Heraclio, Imelda, Herón, Julia, Rogelio y Guadalupe fueron parte de mi vida, los recuerdo siempre y siempre con una sonrisa por todo el legado que dejaron, bueno y malo. Sueño con ellos, les hablo en mis sueños y les abrazo tanto como sea posible. Al termino de la visita a México cumplí mi misión de reencontrarme con mi país, mi gente, mi ciudad, mi familia y por qué no? hasta con viejos amores. Eso no quita que extrañara el Reino Unido, mi casa, mi espacio, mis bicis, mi bosque, mi ciudad, mis amigos. Pero sé bien que todo ello es temporal. Cambridge tiene un efecto interesante en la gente, la mayoría de los que habitamos aquí lo tenemos siempre presente aunque en silencio: Todo aquí es temporal, tus estudios universitarios, tu posgrado, tu contrato postdoctoral, y hasta tu nueva startup . Las personas que conoces hoy, en cinco años estarán al otro lado del mundo,...