Leisure activities / Esteban Martín Álvarez

What do you do in your free time? Why?

Sometimes, people have a lot of free time because they have nothing to do. They haven’t got exams or they have already finished their work, so they get bored. When this happens to me, I feel like doing some activities I enjoy, such as cooking, playing the bagpipes or riding my bike. I’m going to tell you about some of my hobbies in my free time and maybe you like these activities too. If this happens, you can do them with me. I wait you!

Cooking

This is one of my favourite hobbies and I practise it on Fridays and at the weekend. I like cooking Italian food, like fresh pasta and pizzas, but I also make other not so good and delicious recipes (once I made a lot of disgusting mushrooms croquettes which looked like a pile of concrete with crunchy rocks). Some Saturdays I make chocolate for breakfast, and it takes me half an hour or more, if I want that it tastes soft and thick. Some Fridays and Saturdays I make fresh pasta with Bolognese sauce.



Making the dough takes me an hour, and I have to use flour, three or four eggs (depending on the people who are going to eat at home), olive oil and salt.

After making the dough I have to flatten, cut it with a special machine and boil it. This takes me half an hour.

But I also have to make the sauce. This is the longest task, and it lasts about three hours. I use onion, natural tomato sauce, red pepper, carrots, white wine, a little salt and a small piece of Parmigiano-Regiano cheese. After eating it all, there are two activities I like, which are suitable to help digestion.

Swimming and cycling

When the weather is hot I like swimming in the sports centre. I usually go there when I haven’t got much homework, and it’s a relaxing activity, because the water is warm. But if you go while the children are in their swimming class, swimming turns into an impossible and stressful activity.

With cycling there isn’t this problem because the cycle lane is wide and it’s about 25 km long. I have cycled it many times. I go from O Couto, where I live, to Outariz, and then, from Outariz to Untes. From Untes, I go to Velle, passing Outariz and A Chavasqueira. I finish the cycle track passing A Lonia, and I come back home.

Sometimes while I am cycling along the cycle track, I throw some bangers and fireworks. I have got a lot of them. These are some of them:

Playing music

I also play the bagpipes in the Bagpipes School. I go there on Wednesdays, Fridays and some Mondays or Thursdays. I play the bagpipes at home with my own bagpipes. My bagpipes are green, because my aunt is a craftswoman and she wove a special cover for them. These are my bagpipes.

Sometimes in the year I go with the Real Junior Band to bagpipes championships. If you click on this link, you can see the band playing in Viana do Castelo (Portugal).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8JY772qRwQ

We are on first level and we play the bagpipes, the drums and other musical instruments. I started playing the bagpipes six years ago, because I had listened to bagpipes music and I loved it. I hope to be able to go on playing the bagpipes for a lot of years. I also hope to travel to new different places and show other people Galician music.

Now you know some of the activities I do in my free time. As you can see, I try to use my free time properly and I never get bored. I hope you have enjoyed reading it.

You can see me playing the bagpipe in the following video:

by Esteban Martín Álvarez, 4º B ESO

All photos taken by Esteban Martín Álvarez.

My free time!

Hi there!
My name’s Iago and I‘m 15.
I’m a teenager who likes making friends and meeting new people.

I love going out with friends, going for a walk and wandering around the city with them. I usually spend my free time listening to music, surfing the Internet, playing videogames and reading.

I love Rock music, especially Rock-Metal and Punk, but I haven’t got favourite genre nor group. I like Avenged Sevenfold, Bullet for my Valentine, System of a Down, Linkin Park, Sum 41, Franz Ferdinand, etc…

I’m always drawing, because I like it so much.
I do it everyday, as much as I can and wherever I go, even at school. But actually, I’m not very good at it…so I’m working hard to improve my drawing skills!
I draw a lot of doodles and sketches.

I like to surf the Internet and chat with friends online.
I visit a lot of different websites, but the one that I visit the most is 'DeviantART' (http://www.deviantart.com/), a worldwide web where people upload drafts and drawings and users comment and rate it.
I love this site because you can meet people and see theirs creations.
In this web you can upload a lot of different things, as photos, drawings and paintings, comics, strips, landscapes, flash applications and games, wallpapers, and some other stuff for your computer…
You can also join clubs. There are a lot of clubs, each one is dedicated to a concrete topic. A Spanish/French/German/English … members club, a TV show fan club, a music band fan club…there are thousands of clubs, in where you can meet people with your same likes and dislikes, and talk about the club topic and upload something related to it.
There are contests too, in which users can participate and win some prizes.
You can also subscript to this site (but paying for it) and get some services and customization options that a common user can’t access.
I spend a lot of time there, but my uploads are not very good, so I delete them very frequently to upload new and better ones.

I think Internet is a very useful tool because you can meet new people and learn many things, like a foreign language.
I also love videogames. I usually play Wii and Xbox360. I enjoy playing adventure and action games, and I also like other kind of games, like ‘Guitar Hero’.
I don’t like watching TV so much, because Spanish shows are horrible and boring, but I enjoy watching films. My favourite ones are ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (Stanley Kubrick) and ‘Steamboy’. I enjoy reading Manga (Japanese comics) and watching some Anime (Japanese Animation).

Finally, you can see here an example of my drawings:

Hope you like it!!!

Iago Román Vázquez, 4º ESO B

Ainoa Davila Ferreira interviews her father / Spain

It is always said that teenagers are different depending on the time of life. This is true but I believe that there are things that never change and they're still as they were some decades ago.

I asked my father and he told me a lot of things about his teens. His name is Jose Jaime, he is 48 years old and when he was my age it was the beginning of the 80´s.

- Jaime, when you were my age, did you have the same free time as I do? Why?

Yes, because I was studying. Nevertheless, at the same time I used to play football and I had to train three evenings a week.

- Did you use to spend your free time on your own or with other people?

I used to spend my free time with more people because I was part of a team: we trained together and when we finished, we usually went out to have dinner with the coach.

- What about your hobbies?

I loved music and when I was your age I used to listen to Spanish and foreign rock, such as Barón Rojo, Leño, Asfalto, Deep Purple, Pink Floyd, Bob Dylan… We used to go to concerts of this kind of groups and others less important, in Ourense and on the outskirts. Normally, this kind of concerts took place in bullrings or sport centres from midnight to seven o'clock in the morning.

I have wonderful memories of a concert in El Barco de Valdeorras and another one in Xinzo. In the first one we were going to put up a tent but we lost a centerpole and we had to use a piece of wood.

Other hobbies of mine were playing football.

- Why did you do that?

Because I liked music, going to concerts, listening to music at home buying CD's. And I loved playing football because practising sports kept me fit. I always played in teams so as to travel and get to know new places, but then, I met my present wife and I stopped playing football to spend more time with her. A few years later I started playing another kind of football called indoor football but I had to give it up because of a serious injury.

-What did your parents think about it?

They thought that it was good and they came to all the matches. They become friends of other parents. In addition, my father loved going to matches because he played football for the veteran team in Ourense.

- Did other youngsters enjoy doing the same things?

Youngsters close to me did, but there were others who preferred other things, such as going to discos, parties, "guateques"…

- And, did you use to go to discos?

Not so much. Normally I went to discos once a month because my friends would normally go on Sunday evenings but on some Sundays I'd play football.

- Do you think any of your hobbies were useful for your life? Why?

I think so, because now I'm 48 years old and I'm faster than my daughters, who are 17. And this is thanks to football. It's also thanks to football that I keep fit, I'm healthy, I know a lot of friends, I know the province of Ourense and I grew up as person.

- What is your opinion about the way young people spend their free time nowadays?

My opinion is that, nowadays, young people have more enjoyable means than before and they don't know how to value them.

In fact, time goes by, people and their habits change a lot but there are things that never change.

I think young people should take care of the environment and they should value nature more. I disagree with street partying or that people should drink alcohol at these early ages and I believe the problem of young people is that they have got too many things.

By Ainoa Davila Ferreira, 1º BACH

Profile Tobias

My name is Tobias but everybody calls me Tobi. I am 18 years old and come from the town of Bremen in Germany.
Bremen is a maritime city which is really important for my hobby sailing. I have sailed my whole life as have the rest of my family.
I live with my mother in Bremen as my parents are divorced. My father lives in Hamburg close to the water with my youngest brother Malte.
My other 15-year-old brother Christian is a regular teenager and does all the typical things which they do! I go to “SZ Grenzstraße” and really enjoy studying economics and sports. Mathematics is a subject which I don’t really understand because it’s very complex and technical.

I really like friendly and spontaneous people with an open mind. In my free time I meet up with my friends, listen to music and go to concerts or parties. My favourite styles of music are rock and house.
In the future I want to live in California for half a year in order to improve my English. After that I intend to study navigation and become the captain of a large container ship and transport thousands of containers between America and Europe.

I have become a member of this project because I really like to meet other people with different styles, from other cultures, with new hobbies and who speak foreign languages. By the way I like to travel to countries where I never been before. And finally, I enjoy making friends all over the world! I will be in touch soon!

Best wishes,

Tobias

Interviewing eldery people

THE PAST AND NOW

Our parents' and grandparents' free time activities were very different to the leisure activities there are now. Our grandparents didn't have any toys, and they had to work from a very young age.

Now I will talk to a person who had a different childhood:

Me: Hello Teresa! How are you?

Teresa: Hello! I'm fine.

Me: How old are you?

Teresa: I'm 78.

Me: What did you use to do in your free time when you were a child?

Teresa: I sewed or read because there weren't toys.

Me: What was your first toy?

Teresa: My first toy was a doll which my uncle brought me from Venezuela.

Me: Did you have much free time when you were about my age?

Teresa: No, I didn't have much free time.

Me: Why?

Teresa: Because my parents needed me to help with the field jobs and the housework, cooking, cleaning and looking after my siblings.

Me: What is your opinion about the way young people spend their free time nowadays?

Teresa: I think that young people don't know how lucky they are. Without toys and new tecnologies (that they have) we were happier. Young people now don't have imagination to play not even when they are bored.

Me: Teresa, thanks for your opinion.

In conclusion, young people now don't sew or help with the field jobs, they watch TV, go shopping, go to the cinema, surf the internet, play computer or video games, and live very differently to Teresa or other parents or grandparents.

Rocío Dopazo Rodríguez, 1º BACH-E

Profile Leif

My name is Leif.
My personality in 3 words: nice, open-minded and helpful.
Now some details about myself.
I was born in Achim but live in a district of Achim called Baden with my parents. My grandma lives next door. I also got a brother who is studying in Cologne, maybe you will see him. Besides I also got a cat named Viktor. In my free time I hang out with my friends, meet my girlfriend, listen to music (like practically everyone) or just do one of my hobbies like fitness, driving go-kart (not often) or fishing. My favourite food is a cutlet with a special sauce together it’s called “Jägerschnitzel” with croquettes and red cabbage.
First my dislikes: I don’t like lies, dishonest and slandering people. On the other side I like honest, truthful people and people on whom you can count on.
In our school, SZ-Grenzstraße, my favourite subjects are Spanish, English and Sports. I like these subjects, because I like talking in different languages and Sports if it isn’t athletic sport or running.
In my Easter holidays I often travelled to Switzerland, because I skied there. I like skiing, because it makes fun and you have a wonderful view from the top of the mountains. I also travelled to other countries, but I’m looking forward to going to countries were I’ve never been, like Spain which I prefer.
I have no future plans at the moment. First I want to finish school with good marks.
My motivation for this project is to get knowledge of people who live in different cultures.

PS: I’m glad to get to know new people. So if you are interested you can sent me an e-mail: leiferichs_comenius@web.de

Leisure activities in the past and now / Ana Quintas

I think that the leisure activities in the past were different from the activities that people can do now, because of the technologies and the mentality of people nowadays.

In the past, my parents used to spend time with their family more than people do now. They liked, for example, going together for a walk or going on a picnic, especially at the weekend. They also used to spend more time in the street walking and talking because they had less money. But my grandparents did different leisure activities from my parents. They went fishing or hunting because this was a way of life.

Nowadays, I think that there are more activities to do than in the past and they are not the same as my parents and grandparents did. I surf the net researching information about a topic I’m interested in, I visit my favourite websites, watch video clips and I keep in touch with my friends using a social network site. I play computer games on my own or with my friends or family. I play the flute and the piano in a band that I created with my friends. We created it to enjoy our free time but we are not a serious band; we only want to be together.

I don’t think that these activities are fun for my parents or grandparents, because they don’t understand the new technologies, they are not used to them. But for me they are really fun because I learnt how to use them when I was a child, so it is easy for me to work them.

Today people enjoy life more than in the past because they have more money, so they can do a lot of things which are expensive, like going abroad, and people have another way of thinking.

In conclusion, we live better than in the past, we enjoy life and we have great variety of activities to do.

Ana Quintas Santos, 1º E BACH

Leisure activities in the past and now / Adriana Feijóo

Nowadays we know that our way of spending our free time is completely different from our parents’ or our grandparents’.

It’s fantastic to listen our grandparents’ stories about what they did when they where young because it is so different to our leisure activities that we want to know more about that, what activities they used to do and what they think about our activities now.

When I asked my grandfather about his childhood, he told me that everything was better than now because he used to play outside, in the countryside, they breathed clean air, there wasn’t a bad relationship among friends like now, and they were more sociable.

I think that it’s because nowadays a lot of young people spend their free time playing video games or in the computer and this way you don’t develop your social skills.

But on the other hand, we also do activities like playing billiards, playing basketball or dancing that are good to spend our time with friends and that is really enjoyable.

My grandfather says that it’s also true that now we have a lot of activities after school and that means that we don’t have so much free time, and that time we are tired and we prefer being at home or going to the cinema instead of doing other activities.

Perhaps our way of life has changed a lot but most young people still prefer spending their time playing with friends, doing sport, going to the park, listening to music or cooking together, to playing video games at home.

I admit that I love chatting with my friends at nights but if I had to choose between living with a PC all my life or spending only a week with my friends on a trip, of course I would choose the trip.

Adriana María Feijóo Morenza, 1º BACH E

Profile Lisa Katrin

My name is Lisa Katrin. I am 19 years old and I come from Achim that's a small town near Bremen. I live in Achim in a house with my parents and my big brother. His name is Ole and he is 22 years old. Also we have a dog, his name is Barnie. In my spare time I like to play with him also I love to meet my friends, go to the disco, listen to music (in particular rock) and I like to read books.

My friends describe me as an open-minded person with a good sense of humor, also that I'm kind and caring and polite.

I like about people when they are open-minded too and honest. =)
I dislike about people when they are all the time moody, impolite, lazy and prim. =(
After finishing school I want to study and become a teacher for English and German at primary school.
My motivation for the COMENIUS-project is to meet friendly people from Europe and learn a bit more about their cultures. Moreover I'm really excited and looking forward to this exchange.

Profile Torben

I am 17 years old and was born in Germany. I am an open-minded, friendly and polite person.
I`ve got two sisters, one is older, the other younger than me. I live together with the younger one, my mother, her boyfriend and our cat. In my spare time I like to go thai boxing and in the summer riding speed boats. Another passion of me is food. I prefer dishes with meat like "Rinderbraten" to eat. Due to my food passion I am interested in nutrition.
I am active in the Schüler Union which is a political organisation for students and their imagination how school has to be like.
My favourite music is made by German artists like K.I.Z., Kollegah or Rammstein. My favourite subject is English because I am good in it and I like the sound when Americans speak it.
I dislike arrogance, furtiveness and people without intentions.
Special countries I visited are China and the USA. I visit my father in France twice a year.
In my future I`d like to become teacher one day.

My motivation for the COMENIUS-project is to learn about the culture of other countries and see how ordinary people live in these areas.

Profile Janina

My name is Janina. I am 16 years old and come from Bremen, a city in Germany. At the moment I attend SZ Grenzstraße. It’s a school of economics.
I am always happy and I laugh a lot. I like to help people, so I guess am helpful.
I love to play tennis. Since I have been seven years old I have played this game and it’s my favourite sport.
Moreover I like to meet my friends, to cook with them, to go shopping and to watch dvds. My favourite country is Spain, because I was there a few times and I like the language. My foreign language skills are Spanish and English.
My favourite music is R´n`B, House and Pop.
My dislikes are to wake up early in the morning. Moreover I don´t like when people act bitchy.
I’m sociable and I like to get to know new people. In addition I’m even-tempered and reliable. Sometimes I’m a little bit moody but it´s not a distinct feature of me.
I live with my family in Bremen. I have a sister and she’s eleven years old.
In school my favourite subjects are English, Maths and Sport.

Well, my future...I wanted to be a tennis star but it’s too late to become one. I must see realistically in the future. Maybe I want to study, maybe not. I don’t know yet. Definitely later I want to have a job, where I earn much money☺!

My motivation for the COMENIUS project:
I think it is a very good idea to work on a project with other pupils from different countries. I’m interested in this project and very happy to start.

Moreover our communication skills in the foreign language are trained.

Lovely greetings

GOODBYE, ADIÓS, SALUT
Janina