Ramadan

This photograph could have been taken in any Muslim country around the world, or even in places with strong Muslim communities, such as Britain or France. Yet, as you can see above, this photo was taken in Barcelona, and is an image that is here to stay. Muslims are part of Catalonia again, centuries after they were expelled along with the Jews, in an attempt to 'purify' the Kingdom of Spain of its non-Christian population.
Catalonia has been a land of integration since the Phoenicians arrived in Empúries and came across the Iberians already living here, followed by the Greeks, and then the Romans, the Franks, the Goths, and then the Occitans, the Spanish, and now the Africans, the Latin-Americans or the Asians. Immigration is part of the of the Catalan DNA. However, we can’t deny that tensions and conflicts always appear when any country in the world has to deal with newcomers that produces an increase of 20 per cent of the population in less than a decade. Fear of difference is a natural reaction in human beings. That means that an extra effort is needed when our neighbourhood changes with the arrival of people who dress differently, speak differently, who eat differently, and who even pray to a different Lord.
Local authorities around Catalonia are facing the demand of the Muslim community for permission to build mosques and prayer centres. In almost every case, politicians do not want to pay the electoral cost of allowing the construction of a mosque, while tiny xenophobic and racist parties try to make the most of the tension, blaming immigrants for any robbery, any increase in unemployment or, it sometimes seems, a change in the weather.
These people are residents of Catalonia, they are Catalans now, and they have the right to their own temple, as does any other confession in the country. If a local authority denies them this fundamental right, they should also close churches and other temples. There is a saying in Catalonia that fits perfectly in this situation: O tots moros, o tots cristiansNo historical or cultural reasons could be argued to sustain the idea that one religion has more rights than another in a free and democratic country.

Let’s go clubbing!

Companies usually employ marketing teams to come up with strategies for building bonds with their customers. These strategies are almost always top-down. However, sometimes something special happens and the bonds between provider and customer develop spontaneously, bottom-up, helping to create a community of shared interests around the service or product in question.
This is what is happening now at Catalonia Today, as a process that began some months ago comes to fruition. The thousands of interactions through our web site, our podcasts, our Facebook page or our Twitter account suggested that something special was going on; a community of people linked by the English language was growing around our magazine.
The result of this interaction was that the readers and subscribers began to put forward new ideas for enriching this community that was developing. One example was the initiative to convince the managers of the Ocine cinemas to schedule films in original version in differents places around Catalonia. This idea came from the community and we at the magazine supported it and helped make it happen. Another example was when a group of readers and subscribers from the Escola Oficial d’Idiomes, who had been meeting in reading groups for a while, suggested that we spread their idea and help create more reading groups around Catalonia.
Ideas like these are what planted the seeds for the ECClub, the first English Culture Club in Catalonia, which was officially launched last month in Barcelona by its Honorary President, the English writer, Tom Sharpe. The presentation was in the huge Acabus bookstore on carrer Còrsega. We are delighted to have Abacus on board, the largest cooperative in Catalonia, with more than 750.000 members.
ECClub is now up and running and we hope it snowballs to offer ever more events and resources in English to its membership, all based around the ECClub Reading Groups. We want all our readers and subscribers to take advantage of the club, so don’t hesitate to visit http://www.cataloniatoday.cat/ or www.abacus.coop/catalonia-today and learn how you can be a part of this growing family.

Listen and learn

He is a record holder already. He won several titles as a player, and now he is demolishing statistics as a coach. So far, Josep Guardiola has won all three Spanish league titles that he has competed for as a trainer. When Barça bet on this rookie coach to replace the successful Frank Rikjaard to lead the team, only a few believed he could do it. He had never managed a team before, but from the very beginning, Guardiola showed that his leadership as a captain on the field was transferable as a coach. He is a great motivator, no matter if his men are little more than boys taking their first steps in professional football or international stars with massive egos. Guardiola has shown that he knows how to handle a group of top-level football players.
However, this season, after winning the Club World Cup, the Champions League and two La Liga titles in a row, everyone expected less from his group of Barça warriors. However, something happened that helped Guardiola to motivate his team to even greater heights, in the process making him the very first coach to win three La Liga titles in his first three seasons. This 'something' has a name: José Mourinho. Shaming the world of football and even some Real Madrid fans, the Portuguese legend began playing a dirty campaign with the aim of winning via the media what he has largely been incapable of winning on the field.
Guardiola stood strong against every attack, every accusation, every blow below the belt. When needed to motivate his men, he answered with strong words through the press, and like a practitioner of judo, used his aggressor’s strength against himself.
As a result, Barça found the motivation needed to keep the team on high alert, an attitude that helped them to win another La Liga title and an appearance in another European Cup final at Wembley.
The image that accompanies this column was taken two days after winning La Liga. It is amazing how Guardiola manages to keep his men fully concentrated, as they listen to him in silence. Look at the faces; there is only one leader in this group: Josep Guardiola.

Cometh the hero

He is Perry Freshwater, a.k.a. 'Aiguafresca'. He was born in New Zealand, but he played for the English national team in several Six Nations and Rugby World Cup games. He is about to retire from professional rugby, but last month he proved he still has something to offer.
Perry started his career in Europe with the Leicester Tigers in 1995. In 2003, he moved to Perpignan, the capital city of Catalunya Nord to play for USAP, the rugby equivalent of Barça in football terms. With USAP, he won the Top14 French Championship in 2009.
Last April 9, USAP came to Barcelona for the very first time to play their Heineken Cup quarter final game against Toulon. As you can see in the picture, the match was played in a real party atmosphere, where people from both north and south of the Catalan border got together to seal a brotherhood with roots in a common history, language and culture. More than 55,000 tickets were sold, a record for a Heineken Cup game, and it opened the door to a new tradition, that of USAP playing in Barcelona at least once a year.
The match was a tough one. USAP seemed astonished with the spectacular scenario of the Olympic Stadium filled with Catalan flags, and by the response of the fans, not only from Catalunya Nord, but from more than 15.000 followers in the south. Toulon, a team owned by a billionaire who signed lots of international figures, led by the English star Jonny Wilkinson, understood from the very beginning that Perpignan was the team that had to demonstrate their strength. It was not an easy task. The magical feet of Perpignan’s Jeroni Porical kept his team alive, but they saw the light at the end of the tunnel when replacement Freshwater appeared on the field. "Aiguafresca és al camp. S’ha acabat el bròquil!" said a fan in a Twitter message, which could be translated as "Freshwater is on. It’s all over now".
As if through prophecy, in a fantastic move, Freshwater followed Guilhem Guirado’s burst to score what proved to be the winning try.
Aiguafresca became the hero of a day that will be cherished in the memories of many present in Barcelona. It was a day when the brothers from Perpignan came to show us how to win a tough match.

The Centre of the World

La Gare de Perpignan, in the capital city of French Catalonia, or Catalunya del Nord, used to be a grey, forlorn train station on the very bottom rung of the French Republic, so far away from Paris.
Then, on August 27 1963, the Surrealist genius, Salvador Dali, went to Perpignan and made a proclamation that changed the reputation of La Gare: "It all became clear in a flash: There, right before me, was the centre of the universe", Dalí said.The painter publically declared that the Perpignan train station was el centre del món, the centre of the world.
Later, Dalí even created a painting entitled ‘L’Estació de Perpinyà’. The work of art is considered to be an exceptional example of the Surrealist movement. The piece, which features a small image of the train station amid figures of rural farm workers, is intensely symbolic of Dali’s obsessive concern with immortality.
Since then, the people of Perpignan have made Dalí one of their most beloved heroes, and the memory of his surreal words will no doubt live on there forever.
Almost 50 years after Dalí’s revelation, Perpignan inaugurated a new train station to receive the TGV high-speed train that connects the city with Catalonia. Aptly, the first trip on the new line was between Perpignan and Figueres, the hometown of Salvador Dalí.
The new station is a state-of-the-art building, with a large shopping area, an auditorium,12,000 square metres of business space and will soon also boast a spectacular sports area. One of its tasks is to boost the neighbourhood of Sant Aciscle, an area damned to the periphery until now that Dalí’s words have been made a reality. The new Centre del Món, a train station facing south, looks towards its sister of Catalonia on the other side of the Pyrenees.
In recent years Catalunya del Nord in general, and Perpignan in particular, have begun to realise that the answer to the neglect and contempt of distant Paris is to be found over the Pyrenees, where a market of seven million people share a language and a culture.

Let’s go electric!

Antonio Tajani, a Vice-President of the European Commission and European Commissioner for Industry and Entrepreneurship, recently travelled to Milan – by fossil fuel guzzling plane – to take part in the 'Mobility Tech' exhibition. There, Trajani drove an electric Smart car to show the EU’s support for electric vehicles that will soon begin appearing en masse on our streets.
In January 2009, Catalonia Today published an in-depth report on hybrids cars, a technology that combines electrical energy with fuel-driven engines. Almost every big carmaker is offering a hybrid vehicle on its range and in the following months we will begin to see the emergence of all-electric cars, such as the Smart pictured. Catalonia is keen not to miss this particular train and the Seat factory in Martorell will soon be producing 20 electric cars every day.
We know that oil is getting increasingly expensive, as it becomes increasingly difficult to extract, forcing us to take more risks to obtain it, often with fatal consequences, such as the Gulf of Mexico’s disaster.
We are all worried about this problem, but we aren’t going to change our way of life. Governments push citizens to buy more cars, subsidising the industry and offering buyers tax breaks. Thus, electricity seems to offer the right answer. Instead of refuelling at petrol stations, we will be plugging our car in every night at home, just as we do with our iPods or our mobile phones.
However, I can’t help wondering if we aren’t solving one problem only to create another. How are we going to produce enough electricity to recharge car batteries? Most power plants are still using fossil or nuclear fuels to generate electricity. If fossil fuel, we are simply swapping the tank of the car for the tank of the power plant. If nuclear, we should keep in mind that the waste generated by nuclear plants is a hot issue in every country, especially here.
The answer could lie with wind turbines and solar energy but their contribution to the total amount of energy consumption is far from sufficient. We still wait to see how we will get around in the future.

Are you sure you want the euro?

A few months ago, EU finance ministers gave the final approval for Estonia to adopt the euro as its currency on January 1, 2011.
Meeting in Brussels, they decided to use the existing exchange rate of 15.6466 kroon to one euro as the final conversion rate.
The tiny Baltic state, with a population of 1.3 million, will become the 17th member of the single currency.
Estonia met entry requirements on inflation, debt and deficit levels, interest rates and currency stability, but one can’t help wondering if this is such a good idea and that perhaps Estonians should have second thoughts. When many eastern states joined the European Union a few years ago, adopting the euro currency was the main goal for all of them; the euro was seen as a guarantee of stability.
However, with the financial crisis that shocked the continent and the world, the euro showed that it is not invulnerable. The Greek collapse threatened the entire currency system and forced the EU to create new controls to avoid such crises in the future.
Of the EU’s 27 member states, 16 currently have the euro as their currency. Belgium, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Austria and Finland adopted the currency in 2002. Slovenia joined in 2007, followed by Cyprus and Malta in 2008, and Slovakia in 2009.
Although Lord Mandelson had claimed Britain should still join the euro despite the crisis, at present public opinion in the UK is against joining the euro.
Estonian authorities are campaigning strongly to gain the approval of the public, who expect the euro to be a key element in overcoming a crisis that has hit its economy. However, a new currency is anything but new to Estonians. The kroon succeeded the mark in 1928 and was in use until the Russian invasion in 1940, after which it was replaced by the Soviet ruble. Upon regaining independence, in 1992, the kroon was reintroduced. Now the kroon will dissappear again, and the euro will be the official currency when 2011 begins.