Writing about my trip to Italy

By the way, did I tell you about my trip to Italy? Yes, the one we did two weeks ago. Probably not, well, I'll explain it to you. First I'm going to talk about my first thoughts of it, then all the places we visited and finally my opinion.

To begin with, I'm going to say that it was such a dream come true. I have lots of friends who have done this trip before, and what they told me was more or less the same I felt there.

At 4:45 we were all supposed to be at the school and ready to go, but we had to wait for some people who where late. After this incident, approximately at 5:05 we were driving road to Barcelona. All my classmates and I were so enthusiastic about the trip.  We were at the airport of Barcelona at eight and we arrived at eleven to Italy. We get into the bus until we were in Sirmione, where we had lunch. We ate homemade Italian pizza for the first time. After lunch, we visited the city of Sirmione and went to the hotel. We saw some amazing things in that city, like a purple shop and a place where you can warm your feet. When we were installed at the hotel, we left to see Verona. There we were able to visit the Arena and the Julieta’s balcony. We had a great time there and we took some photos. Some of us ate some kind of ice cream.

The next day, we woke up early in the morning and went to Venice, where we first visited the Piazza di San Marco, and we met with students of Josep Brugulat high school. In our free time we went shopping and walking through the streets of the city. After that, we got into the vaporetto and got back to the hotel. Venice was really amazing and beautiful.

At midnight, some of my friends came to my room to wish me a happy birthday, because it had just started. In the morning we were at Firenze, there we saw Santa Maria del Fiore and the Ponte Vecchio. After lunch, we had some free time to buy presents for our families and that kind of things. As I said, it was my birthday so my friends prepared me a surprise and brought me a cake after dinner.

On Thursday we went back to Firenze and went up the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, there were such amazing views. We had time for art, too, because we went to the Galeria dell’Accademia to see some important works of art. Then we went to San Niccolò to watch the views of the city. From there we were able to see other important buildings of Frienze.

We spent the last day in Pisa. We took some selfies with the tower and we were able to go upstairs and see everything from there. We met some people there and took photos with them. We had really fun.

After it, we took a bus to the airport. We had a very long delay, so we arrived later the thought. We were all very tired and at 3:00 am we were at the school again.

Nicolai Balateu

Writing about formal letter

16 Fontana Street

Banyoles

17820

Comercial Arge, S.A. PILOT

Plaza López de la Plata, 4

Madrid

28043

Tuesday 3rd November

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about the efficiency of your delivering company.

I ordered some products of your online shop last week. I received a notification to my mobile phone saying that they were going to arrive on Thursday morning. I thought it was completely understandable due to the distance.

I received your products a week after the established delivery day. Furthermore, I was shocked that the box did not contain everything I had ordered. There were two Super Grip Neon pens missing and one of the Down Force pens had the ink rollerball broken.

I’m not satisfied with the price of the delivery costs, which I found completely unacceptable and overstated.

Until now, I had always been really pleased with your products because they are efficient and very useful. It is very sad that your delivering company does not work as well as your company does. Under the circumstances, I would be grateful if you could give me a refund for the missing and useless articles I bought.

I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

Yours faithfully,

Nicolai Balateu

Writing about an article

Dear Editor,

I am writing in response to an article I read on Friday’s edition of your newspaper.

I should say I did not like the way you threated the train, the public transport that most of the students need to get to their schools or even to their work.

Firstly, I consider there is no need to make old-fashioned something that such an amount of people uses. Public transport advertisings are nowadays everywhere and they are, in fact, trying to encourage citizens to use them and to avoid pollution.

Furthermore, statistics show that the train is one of the most used public transports after the car in our country. Students of all places use it everyday to skip traffic backups and to safe money, as well as other people who takes the train to get to work without having to spend a lot of hours in their cars.

Finally, I would like to reaffirm my point by letting you know my experience with the train a year ago. I had to go to Madrid with my family, so we took the train and we got there in only four hours, and the train was really full of people. If we had taken the car, we would have waste a lot of money and time on the road.

Kind regards,

Nicolai Balateu

Writing about an informal mail

Hi John!

How are you? How's school going? Have you done something interesting these days?

Do you remember the girl who was here when you came to visit me? She was an aupair. Let me explain it to you. An aupair is a person (boy or girl) that comes from another country to your home and helps you to learn a language.

I first thought it was a waste of time and that the aupair wouldn't be good... But the experience has told me that I've been wrong all this time. When she came to my home and introduced herself I thought she was cool. Then we agreed to do an hour of class in the morning and talk in English the rest of the day. And at the end of the summer, I had a lot of fun with her.

I mean, you have an opinion about something but then you try it and it’s completely different. Has it never happened to you?

I’m really pleased because I’ve spent a really good time this summer, and I’ve learned a lot of English too. You should try the experience of having an aupair.

Anyway, I’ve just remembered that I still have to write her and email to explain how are things going.

Take care,

Nico

The first YouTube video

Happy Birhday YouTube

Created in 2005, YouTube celebrates its 10th birhday this year. Why is it so succesful?

The first video uploaded on YouTube is called "Me at the zoo". It was posted in 2005 by Jawed Karim, one of the three creators of the website, and it shows him at San Diego zoo. The video is not interesting, but it was the begining of a great succes story: Internet users suddenly had a platform to share their ow videos! With 300 hours of content uploaded every minute, you will always find what you are looking for. You decide what you want to watch on your own "tube" a slang word for "TV".


Influence and Barack Obama:
YouTube is not only used by young people, humorists, or for cat videos. It is also a perfect way for politicians and importan public igures to reach a wider audience. For this 2008 presidential campaing, Barack Obama used YouTube as his main channel of information. One of the best known videos sows obama giving his first speech with the slogan "Yes we can". The slogan helped him to become the first black president of the United States of America!

Music and Justin Bieber:
In 2007, videos of a 13-year-old boy singing and playing the guitar were posted on YouTube. A music producer saw them, was impressed and contacted the singer's mother. The myth Justin Bieber began. Two years later, Biebe's song were a huge hit with teenagers. Without YouTube, Justin Bieber's success would not have been so fast. And like him, other singers have been discovered on YouTube like PSY with his song "Gangnam Style" -it is still the website's most-viewed video ever.

Maths, make-up and cooking:
Salman Khan started teaching his cousin maths via videos uploaded on YouTube. His views continued to grow and, in 2006, Khan created the "Khan Academy", a Youtube channel offering free tutorials and classes. The videos were viewed 458 milion times all around the world. Today, there are thousands of tutorials on YouTube. You can learn to do almost anything: knitting, make-up, and even unblochink toilets!

My oral Presentation

Video:

PRESENTATION QUESTIONARE:
-Did you organize your ideas in order of importance?

-Did you use discourse makers to make your ideas more clear? (First, then, secondly, on the on hand, on the other hand, finally...)

-Did you introduce interesting NEW information to your audience?

-Did you look up information/facts/ideas in the internet, books...?

-Was your information more superficial or more detailed and original?

-Did you check your grammar(verbs, word order)

-Did you use rich vocabulary looking up the dictionary?(synonyms, new words, expressions...)

-Did you use sentence linkers(and, but, moreover, also, furthermore, although, however...)

-Did you use filters? (well, you know, for example, one second..)

-Did you know how to pronounce all your words?

-Did you check the pronunciation?

My last summer

BEGINNING OF THE SUMMER:

The starting of my summer was awesome!! I first rowed on the Spain championship. They were in Banyoles. We were training for this regatta since September, the starting of the season. The weather was extremely hot! The sun heated so hard, but we could row without any problems. We did it quite good.

LONDON:

After I rowed in the Spain championship, I went to Eton (London), in a rowing camp with my friend Laura. We spent one week (approximately) there. Apart from rowing, we did lots of things more like: shopping, dragon boating, water polo, swimming and a lot of more exercises. Last day we did and exhibition with the eigh(boat), we s up on the bode for a few seconds and then we sited down. I made new friends there, which were they really nice. We had a great time there. 

MENORCA:

I spent 1 month in Menorca, as every summer. I went there by boat. When I arrived there, I met my friends. Basically what I did was sailing, swimming, hanging out with friends, going to the cinema, etc. I have lots of friends there, but this year I made new friends. One afternoon, I had to throw the bean. There, I saw an old TV, so I decided to unscrew it...

CAMPRODON:

Such as in Menorca, in Camprodon I have lots of friends. Every summer we stay some days there. I met my friends, and, I made new ones, too… I hanged out with them. I went to dinner with family. I played football. I celebrated a party of one of my friends. And, as something I am not used to do everyday, I went to play golf with my father.

BANYOLES:

I made an electrical car. On 10^th of September it was my “Saint”, so I bought some things, on of them was a robot. When it arrived to me I started building it. Also, I designed and made a blog, witch I worked when I could.