Beauty of "El Parque del Retiro"

The Retiro park is the one I most visited in some sunny weekends afternoons. Most of time, it is never a quiet place for reading, you always see kids chasing around and non-stopping drum performance every corner, folk magician performance, dancing, puppet theater...but it is these elements that make Retiro so ALIVE, it is a place for everyone...


Some pics of Retiro...The 1st one is Retiro lake at 10pm in summer, the 2nd around 4pm in autumn.



The 3rd kids watching live puppet theater performance. Usually one performer plays two or three different roles at one time, and always funny stories with happy ending. Simply standing there feeling the atmosphere has already been delightful experience...from time to time, kids shout out of surprise or burst into laughters by the stories of small characters on the stage, they just take so seriously for each single plot...lovely innocence of young hearts...



The 4th pic a common Spanish family...The little girl standing next to the bike in the pic suddenly found that I was taking her pic, she immediately called on her parents, I was so embarrassed and simply ran away...stupid foreigner, jajaja!

Nordic Christmas Bazaar

This is an annual pre-Christmas Bazaar held in central Madrid by Nordic people. Theoretically stuff in this Bazaar should all come from Finland, Norway, Iceland (there are not many people from Iceland living in Madrid though), while in fact most of stands are run by Germans. Oh, actually we only saw one Finnish stand serving some hot wine (I never thought red wine can be drunk hot and still taste good!) by an old Finnish lady. Putting Emilia's comments, "well, Germans are more organized", her pretending-to-be serious tone combining with her cynical facial expressions had really funny effect. I couldn't help laughing...It was a great late afternoon!

The pic left above was outdoor area which almost accounted for half space of the Bazaar, most people there were having German sausage and bread though.

The church on the right side looked really nice with vendors for Christmas gifts, candies, books, toys...some traditional stuff...

IE Business School 2007 Graduation Ceremony Prologue

Dec. 21, 2007, our graduation ceremony with all international programs including IMBA, Executive IMBA, Masters in Management (Master of Telecom & Digital Business, Master of Marketing, unfortunately Master of Finance already left in July).

Graduation Day

When receiving school mail informed of the graduation ceremony event, my attitude was totally aloof: anyway the master is over, attending an event only for the sake of celebrating its being over seems not needed at all. BTW, the graduation ceremony means many of us are leaving Madrid, perhaps, for ever...and many of us will not be able to see each other again, making me feel sad and subconsciously declining facing the fact...And I don't like seeing people drinking around showing happy faces saying congratulations for your finishing the master...Oops, too cynical again :p

Overall studying in IE is my most wonderful experience so far in my life...I'm deeply proud of myself being part of IE community, the keynote speech is not that awesome as expected though, I felt my emotional ups and downs during the ceremony...

Ok, a few pics during ceremony...

张爱玲

原来张爱玲的小说是写给成年女子看得。。。。