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Spectacular, both the production of the competition and the flamenco show. Miss France 2024 was held in Dijon and broadcast on the TF1 television channel.

The full show:

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This year I won’t film the Christmas lights or the nativity scenes, so here I leave these photos of the square of the San Sebastián church 🙂

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Last month of the year. A month to think, reflect, evaluate, and plan for the next year.

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Today, it has been a very special day. My cousin Cristina’s wedding. Of all my cousins, she was the first to have a wedding (my cousin Jorge had gotten married first, but civilly without any type of ceremony or celebration). It was in the church of San Juan Bautista de Marchena:

It has been an incredible wedding. Now it’s time to rest, my body is destroyed after many hours of dancing.

As an anniversary of the day completely unrelated to the above, today marks exactly 530 years since Christopher Columbus landed on a Caribbean island and named it Guadalupe, in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Cáceres (Extremadura, Spain).

All documentation, including the ship’s logs and personal diaries of Christopher Columbus, are preserved in Seville in the Archive of the Indies building. Right next door, in the cathedral, his mortal remains lie in an impressive tomb:

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Narrated by Peter Dinklage, the actor who plays Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones. The campaign has cost 38 million euros.

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Searching through the trunk of memories (that is, the hard drive), recovering some photos and recordings made with the iPhone from fairs from a few years ago (especially the typical Instagram stories… should I make one again?) I found myself It seemed interesting to publish them. At the end of the post I explain some things.

Fair of Marchena 2015

Llámame Lola fair booth:

Fair of Marchena 2016

Delia Suárez with La Bejazz at the caseta Llámame Lola:

Improvised flamenco in the “botellones” (area where young people bring bags with drinks, glasses and ice):

Fair of Marchena 2017

María “La Peke” with la Bejazz at caseta El Soniquete:

Of course, improvised flamenco in the street cannot be missed after the casetas close (6 in the morning):

Fair of Marchena 2018

Caribbean rhythms with Son de Cuba:

This is where the citrus fruit joke was born:

El Soniquete is a booth created by my friends. I am not a member, but my brother, my cousin, etc. are, so I consider it my booth even if I am not a member. Many of my friends are musicians, as you can see in the videos Mane Moraza, Pablo and Javier Carmona, Kisko Hidalgo, Amaga… (la Bejazz). I have known María “La Peke” since we were kids, because she was my classmate at school. Regarding “Son del Manchón”, the two in the middle are the sisters María and Ana Dorado, I have also known them since they were little, because their parents are very friends with my uncle and aunt. On the left was their cousin Marta Ponce (blonde), and on the right Carmen Ponce, cousin of Marta but not of María and Ana. In short, I am surrounded by many artists and everything is within family. This year the El Soniquete booth has been in charge of giving the fair opening speech. Ana Martín (Mane Moraza’s wife) was chosen as the person who gives the opening speech because she was who had the idea to create the booth. She chose her cousin Leticia Martín as the host. And her son Lorca was the one who pressed the button that turns on the lighting that officially opens the fair. The name Lorca is in honor of Federico García Lorca, famous Andalusian poet. Both the poetry recited by Ana in the opening speech, and the lyrics that Son del Manchón sang during the opening speech, are by Federico García Lorca. Ah! El Manchón is the name of another booth they belong to. At the Marchena fair, unlike others like the fair of Seville, all the booths are free access, anyone who wants can enter, except during the members’ dinner on Wednesday.

For such a small town (19,000 inhabitants) it is a town with a lot of culture and history (it already existed centuries before Christ). Monuments, artists, religious processions, flamenco…. And I want to show you everything, are you coming?

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One of the mistakes I have made during all these years is not having been more clear, direct and transparent. Knowing how to understand people’s hints is very good, but after that you have to take a step, not stop at that. It’s something I’m changing lately. But there are people I want to meet and I have no way to contact them.

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Now that the second video of the Marchena 2023 fair is almost ready to publish, I would like to clarify some things.

The first thing is that I am not going to publish the photos here on the website until I have published the third video on YouTube, so as not to “spoil” any surprises ahead of time.

The second thing is that I do all of this by myself. I don’t have any team of people by my side, no assistants or anything. And I do everything with a very small budget. My camera is a Canon DSLR, yes, but a very cheap, beginner’s model. If it looks so good and so professional it is because I know how to get the most out of it due to my many years of experience taking photos. However, I only started making videos a year ago, during Easter 2022. Many problems with my videos are due to my lack of experience and others are due to using a cheap camera. Problems with focus, with sometimes everything looking TOO close, and above all, problems with STABILIZATION, or rather, the lack of it. Because my camera does not have a stabilizer, and I have to use an option in the video editor on the computer to stabilize by software, but it is super slow and makes a lot of mistakes, it makes strange movements, as you can see in the videos. To avoid having this problem I need a 4,000 euro camera (Canon R5), which would also solve the problems of blurring and everything being seen too close.

Another thing is that the videos take me forever to make. Apart from the fact that it is a laborious job in itself, the computer takes a long time processing. And between the analysis of the stabilization, the export, the reconversion to 4K, and the upload to YouTube, hours and hours are spent. I have a 2011 Mac Mini that is already asking for retirement.

Since I have to add a photo to the publication, I’m posting a preview of one of the photos from the fair. The one on the right is my cousin Teresa.

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These last few months have helped me reflect and understand what is happening with my life and what mistakes I have been making. Nobody is perfect, but the truth is that I have been the stupidest person in the world.

When I went to live alone, I became obsessed with trying to run an online business. At first, my idea was only to advertise myself as a photographer to do photo shoots here in town, but little by little the idea began to form that I could earn a living directly through the Internet. I read a lot of digital marketing books, and at that time what everyone said was that I should gain a lot of followers on social networks, and that when I had many I could sell them something or advertise other brands and get paid. They said that you just had to post every day and that sooner or later your followers would increase.

The mistake I made, and the one that almost cost me my life (I’ll tell you why later), is that I became obsessed with doing it by myself. I lived alone, I didn’t go out with friends, I didn’t see my family, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t have a life because all I wanted was to move the online business forward. I survived with help of about 400 euros a month, which obviously didn’t give me enough to do anything with. And the mistake here is that, when a person is always alone, socially isolated, they end up with severe depression, and when you have depression you can’t do anything, you have no energy, no creativity, not even to work online sitting at a computer. And that, over the years, caused me so much stress that I ended up getting sick. One day I realized that I couldn’t swallow solids or liquids. It was acid reflux esophagitis (stress gastroesophageal reflux), and it was so severe that medications to reduce stomach acid did nothing. I was like that for years. Plus we were in a pandemic, with confinements, masks and so on.

Having been so socially isolated and without financial resources made me lose my spark and my joy. I had no energy, I had no desire for anything. I was no longer the same. Before that I had high expectations, I wanted to reach very high and achieve a lot of success. I got to know very interesting people, so much so that if I told it, no one would believe me. And yet my mistake of socially isolating myself made me sink to the bottom. I stopped being myself.

If everything goes well, I will soon begin a new stage in my life. I can’t say anything more at the moment. I have many things to achieve, and many people to meet. Oh la la.

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