Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Snake chasing clouds at Expo Zaragoza

Everyday at Expo Zaragoza 2008, from noon -where the sun will be quite high and strongly shinning- the Circus of Sun will give a walk to its snake to help clouds to move and show the power of rain while presenting the Legend of the Rainbow.

JeanFrançois Bouchard, the project manager explained that- the 75 minutes parade will start near the statue representing “the Soul of the Ebro river” by Jaume Plensa (you can see a previous post about his work by clicking here ). Around 80 actors, acrobats, dancers will guarantee full “watered” interaction with the public (eg. there will be machines evoking the smell of mud) , all with the world class quality guaranteed by le circle du Soleil…

I am sure this will be an interesting performance, even more because of it being enrooted in real spanish life, where after long periods of droughts, entire towns go out with the local saint/virgin Mary to pray for rain. Of course, not only when it doesnt rain spain become religious...i will dedicate one blog to some religious and cultural traditions that influence the "soul" of the spaniards...

Monday, July 16, 2007

Historic Zaragoza in 1 post

With more than 20 centuries on its shoulders, Zaragoza´s history comes to meet you… you have just to walk around to discover it. I will just highlight 3 “must”:

-El Pilar y la Seo: “El Pilar” is a Fantastic basilique built where the Virgin Mary appeared in the year 40 to Apostol Saint Jacques. There inside you have “frescos” from Goya . La cathedral of “La Seo” is where previously was the mayor Mosque of the city.
-La Aljaferia: what can I say…you want to feel transported to exotic places like Marrakech. No problem. Enter this Muslim castle from XI century and start smelling the orange trees among small reservoirs of water and admiring the religious writings and symbols around the deliciously decorated ceilings. Note that the regional parliament is housed here…
Of course, many more things to visit. Many more things to live…imagine to have live music in a Roman amphitheatre…oh yes! Imagine to enter in the modern building of a regional savings bank and discover inside “El Patio de la Infanta”, a nice renacentist “courtyard” from the XVI century, ….Zaragoza will surprise you!

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

“Acciona”, saulty water and Expo Zaragoza 2008

Acciona is a multinational working, among others, in the field of water
desalination. They are also official partners of Expo Zaragoza 2008 (in fact they will exhibit in a huge 1000 m2 pavilion) and they use this fact for their ads in newspapers.

Specifically Acciona will sponsor with 8 million euros (partially deductible). Acciona itself has been granted several projects within the Expo, including pavilions and other major infrastructures.

Coming back to the ads of Acciona, above you can see -next to the Expo Zaragoza logo- an example of their vision of a better tomorrow. They say: this year, we will build in California the biggest desalination plant in the USA, with a capacity of 204.000 cubic metres per day. Wouwww! This is a lot of water for thirsty people…. looking in the info of a previous post we could debate if they drink too much: Zaragoza consumes 100 litres per inhanbitant per day…Los Angeles 400 Litres…. Rwanda has an average water consumption of 10 litres per person per day...

What the advertisement doesn’t say is that to take the salt out of the water you need a lot (but a lot) of electricity, ie. a lot of potential CO2 emissions…and it could, because Acciona is also working on renewables....

In Spain a plan (called Agua) was presented to build plants to produce 600 millon of cubic metres of water per year. This is a lot of CO2 emissions if fossil energy is used to fuel them

If Spain is to comply with Kyoto targets, will need to plug all this new plants to non-fossil sources such as solar, wind, etc. We will see...probably a fantastic debate (sponsored by Acciona ;) to take place at the Expo Acciona pavilion next year.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

Expo Zaragoza 2008: The biggest water show on earth

30 seconds advertisement of Expo Zaragoza 2008….in spanish but self-explanatory.