Keep moving!

 

Tips for Staying Fit

Any type of regular, physical activity can improve students’ fitness and their health. The most important thing is that students keep moving. Students should examine their course load and determine exactly how and when they will make time for exercise. Exercise should be a regular part of their day, like studying, going shopping, and sleeping. It can be in gym class, joining a sports team, or working out on your own. If you are a student keep the following tips in mind:

Being Active Every Day

Students should walk more. Just walking alone can help students stay in shape, feel more energetic, and get healthy. Walking is easy to fit into their basic daily activities too, making it one of the easiest solutions for staying in shape. The next easiest way to fit in more walking is to make sure that you’re always taking the stairs. Skip the elevator and escalator when you can. The students can do more chores. Lots of household chores actually involve a lot of exercise and it can be a great way for you to fit activity and exercise into your day. They can do some of these: mowing grass using a push-mower, making the bed, doing the laundry, and scrubbing the bathtub.

The students have to fit exercise into their schedule. Students have to exercise although they might not have the time. However, all students need to do to start burning calories is maintain a higher heart rate for 10 minutes at a time. This means that they can exercise for that extra ten minutes that they have between coming home and waiting for the dinner, or between watching TV and going to bed. 

Eating Right

Students have to change their lifestyle. Diets can help them shed a few emergency pounds in a pinch, but they can the same results with minimal exercise if they eat healthy, properly proportioned meals. This will keep them energetic. They must cut out unhealthy fats. Students can find saturated and trans “solid” fats in foods like butter, cheese, coconut oil, vegetable shortening, red meats, chicken skin, and commercially baked products (cookies, pizza, donuts, cakes, etc. Students must add in healthy fats. Healthy fats are vital for keeping their body healthy and maintaining their most important muscle: their heart. They can find healthy fats in nuts, olive oil, avocados, and fatty fish like salmon and anchovies. The students should eat properly portioned, balanced meals. Generally, about ⅓ of their plate should be fruits and vegetables (leaning more heavily to the side of the vegetables, since fruit contains a lot of sugar) and ⅓ of their plate should be grains. The final third should be a mix of protein and low-fat dairy (cottage cheese, eggs, non-fat milk, etc)

A major event in a famous person's career

Oscar de la Renta



Oscar de la Renta was born on July 22nd, 1932, in the Dominican Republic. During his childhood, he had showed a lot of interest for the arts. He had been taking art classes since he was 10 years old. He had decided to leave the island to study painting in Madrid however, after a short time in Spain, he had been enticed by fashion and 2 years later, he had just decided to switch his focus. He had been working as a magazine illustrator for Balenciaga and quickly became one of the most famous designers. His style had inspired women all around the world, and several of them had been presidential first ladies.








In 1961, he had been hired for his first real fashion job at Lanvin-Castillo. He had moved to New York and joined the American design house of Elizabeth Arden. He had begun his own signature ready-to-wear label since 1965.




Despite Oscar de la Renta had suffered a great tragedy in the 1980s because his wife death (bone cancer in 1983) he did something exceptional; he adopted a son, whom he named Moises Oscar. He had found the boy in an orphanage (day care center named Casa de Niños that he had funded and where he had been working and giving support) in his native country. The center gave children who lived in poverty a place to go and parents a place to leave their children in safety. As soon as he saw the boy who became his son, de la Renta became extremely drawn to him and despite the fact that friends were against the adoption, the designer took the child home as his own.









De la Renta had been diagnosed with cancer during the first decade of the 2000s. He died of complications from the disease on October 20, 2014 at the age of 82 in Kent, Connecticut.

The situation of the elderly people in Costa Rica

Dear Editor

I am writing to express my concerns about the situation of the elderly people in Costa Rica

There is not a culture in favor of senior citizens in Costa Rica and there’s no longer any respect for them. We have been listening about how they are suffering abandonment, discrimination, abuse and neglect daily and because of these issues they have been sinking into depression. The National Advisory for Older Adults (CONAPAM) estimates that three of every 10 seniors are abused (physically, psychologically, or in some other way.) In 2008, more than 1,000 seniors reported being victims of abuse, with the most suffering from abandonment or neglect. The organization has been tracking reported cases of abuse since 2005, and it has noticed an increase in reported cases because more people have been seeking help.

 However there are more issues such as physical abuse, psychological abuse, patrimonial abuse and institutional abuse. We have been reading and watching news about how people leave their elderly parents alone without care, without food, without help using the bathroom and without social interaction. Some people have been looking for the way to leave them alone in the hospitals and sometimes these elderly people have been force to move to  nursing homes, however they come in normal and, little by little, they deteriorate until they become depressed. There are two negative mentalities toward nursing homes in Costa Rica. First: People are indisposed to bring their parents to these nursing homes because they think it means they are a bad son or daughter; however it can mean a better life for them. And second one, when those people think that nursing homes are places to leave them there alone to be care by others and this is the real problem, because they are abandoned and forgotten by their relatives.

The government has been investing money and today we have a hospital dedicated to treating older people. However, we have to work together to reduce and eliminate these issues because, all these will affect all of us, but it’s not only laws or a change in labor practices that will improve the situation, we need to create a culture of respect among families and society.

The construction of a new bridge has started in Desamparados City

                           

                                     

Have you visited Desamparados lately? If your answer has been affirmative you have noticed that Desamparados is growing more and more and there are a lot needs and problems. Some of these problems are related to the transportation and the traffic jams.  The drivers who are coming from San Antonio or Patarra to Desamparados and the drivers who come from San Sebastian or Paso Ancho to Cartago have to go across Desamparados downtown and it brings traffic congestion almost all the time but those problems increase during the peak hours.

The number of traffic jaws and car accidents in the canton of Desamparados, located south of Costa Rica’s capital, has doubled in the past year and they are getting worse, according to a report released Monday by The Consejo Nacional de Vialidad (Conavi) Director German Valverde. The report states that fifteen thousand cars accidents occurred in Desamparados from Jan. 1 to Nov. 18, a figure surpassed only by the Central San José canton, at six thousand. Last year, Desamparados ranked fourth among Costa Rican cities with more traffic jams. That means the canton currently is second across the nation in terms of traffic congestion, surpassing San Jose.

It has been a problem during the past 10 years. The City government has a long list of things to do, however, according to the Mayor Maureen Fallas, she has made a lot of progress in Desamparados during her two administrations. (She has been the Mayor since 2010).

The construction of the bridge started eight months ago, and it is placed near Los Dorados and San Antonio. This project has been pending for ten years. It will bring a solution to the traffic problems. This bridge will have 22.5 meters long with capacity for two lanes. The local government has invested 200 million of colones in this project and it will be ready until December 2015. The Consejo Nacional de Vialidad (Conavi) estimates that 20 thousands vehicles will use this bridge daily.

Predictions

                                           

                                                       The future, fifty years from now

Before you start to read this blog that I titled "The future, fifty years from now" about my predictions, I want to explain you the reasons of them. My predictions are influenced for two facts: my knowledge about computer science and also because I am a person who likes to read a lot about science fiction. Here I will give you some of them.

                                      

By 2065 all global financial transactions will be conducted through Bitcoin (crypto currencies). It is because more people are going to buy using internet and they will require a safest new kind currency and it will be the bitcoin. It is because the credit cards will not be accepted anymore on the web, because they proved to be risky and easily cloned by hackers. If you did now about that and you want to try to use this kind of currency, I want to give you an advice. You must have to write down your user‘s name and password because if you lose them, you will lose all your bitcoins, because there isn’t way to recover it.

                                  

By 2065 computer programming will be considered a core skill required in almost of all jobs. We are required to use new applications in our phones, computers and tablets and we are giving feedback and making improvements to these applications and those are the first steps to program. People will need to know how to do that to get a job.

                                   

By 2065 we will seen a growing number of highways designated for driverless-vehicle only. This year Google built a driverless smart car and it was tested on the highways of California and passed it pretty well. The uses of this kind of vehicles will be in the transportation of goods and services. Companies such as DHL and UPS will use them to transport all the packages to the different stores or offices to be delivered by men only on the last stage of the process. In 2017 Germany’s government is going to build a track in the highway designated for electrical or hybrid vehicles to allow them to travel longer distances.

                                   

By 2065 we will see wireless power to light up our houses and all the electrical appliances and equipment such as TVs, computers, tablets, etc. Today, we are able to charge our phones without use any wire, we just leave the phone on a kind of pad and it stars to charge. In the future, we will not see more wires through the house however our electrical equipment will work normally.

An amazing trip

One of my happiest memories has to be when I was eleven and I took my backpack to travel with my friend Douglas from Limon to Talamanca. We decided to do that trip by ourselves. We wanted to be backpackers to travel free of schedules and also we had a month to complete the journey.



I met Douglas at the school and we were scouts from different units. We always did long trips and we loved to walk a lot, we used to walk together every day about 2 miles to get to our school. We walked that distance for 9 months and when decided to be backpackers we knew we had the physical condition to do it.



The first day of our vacation we spent the entire time planning the trip and searching for options to stay. We took a bus to Limon and from there we started to walk to Talamanca to find a Douglas’s friends who lived near Panama and he was a scout too.




The first day in Limon we spent the entire time in the ocean, we played cards and talked in the evening and that night we spent it in our tents near the beach.




The days after that we walked by hours near the beaches such as Cahuita and Puerto Viejo and Manzanilllo and we spent the nights there. Five days after that we left the beaches to start our journey to the mountain.



We walked by ten days to reach our goal; it was to find the house of Douglas’ friend in Talamanca near Panama.

Ttraveling solo

                                                               Traveling alone

Since I am a high school student, I used to spend my vacations with my friends, we used to ride our bikes for hours to visit new places and cities. One time my uncle drove us to Perez Zeledon, when we were there, we put our bikes down and we started to ride them toward San Jose. My uncle was behind us all the time. I already have an amazing experience, which I want to share because I am sure I will carry with me until my last days because I was doing something good but I was sad because I did not have any of my friends to enjoy and share that: my first flight to the United States.

Though traveling is not a big deal for me today, before my trip to the United States, I used to be a homebody. I had friends to hang out with, several hobbies, and I felt completely comfortable spending my vacations in my hometown or sometimes even on my block without going anywhere.

The situation changed when one day a person came to my class and she talked about an exchange program to visit the United States. (The Work Travel program provides foreign students with an opportunity to live and work in the United States during their vacation from college or university to experience and to be exposed to the people and way of life in the United States). I will not describe how she managed to persuade me to join but she did a good job using pictures and videos where some students talked about that wonderful experience.

This was not my first time outside of Costa Rica, however it was my first flight to the United States and I was alone, without any friend close to me, so I was sad. When the plane was flying over the United States, I was turning my head in all directions through the little window of the plane to admire the buildings and mountains. Unfortunately, the weather was foggy most the time, even despite this fact, I still enjoyed the view.



On my first day there, I stayed in a big hotel and it had a restaurant on the top but it was amazing because, it rotates all the time. Few days after that, I took another flight to Nevada where I was hired to work. It was a hotel near Sierra Nevada where I learned to practice snowboarding and it became my hobby there. I used to practice every weekend and I met some new friends from other countries.