You’ll Never Walk Alone !!

Liverpool fans on The Kop, which is a stand in the Anfield Stadium, were one of the first groups of supporters to sing popular songs at football matches, and one of the first songs they adopted for the club was You’ll Never Walk Alone.

The song was written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, for their musical Carousel in 1945.

The famous version by the Liverpool beat combo Gerry and the Pacemakers, was released in 1963 and adopted by The Kop not long after.

The song quickly became the anthem of Liverpool Football Club and is invariably sung by its supporters, moments before the start of each home game. The words “You’ll Never Walk Alone” also feature in the club crest and on the Shankly Gates entrance to Anfield, the home stadium

The song says:

When you walk through a storm, hold your head up high
And don’t be afraid of the dark
At the end of the storm, there’s a golden sky
And the sweet, silver song of a lark

Walk on through the wind
Walk on through the rain
Though your dreams be tossed and blown

Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk alone

Walk on, walk on
With hope in your heart
And you’ll never walk alone
You’ll never walk alone

It is curious that a football club has this song as a hymn you might think that having a romantic score means that perhaps this song expresses people feelings because humans never stay alone.

When you were a child, your parents take care of you, when you were a teenager your friends were the most important thing, after you have a partner and you have your own children and when you are old perhaps someone stays with you

Our society can get many things when people are grouped together with a common project; an example was improving labour rights in the Industrial Revolution and nowadays the 15th May movement or in our land the fight for the flow of the river and the survival of the Delta

But when we see what has happened these days in the UEFA European Championship with two countries’ supporters fighting, it was terrible and it shouldn’t be that our society heads this way.

I prefer to walk alone instead of being in this company but I think we can’t ever walk alone because together we will be invincible

Tere, June 21st 2016

The coat of arms of Tortosa

A few weeks ago, Tim, an Australian friend who I met in El Forn de la Canonja doing language exchange, asked me for the meaning of Tortosa coat of arms. And that was a really good question because I have never raised that issue, and actually I didn’t have a good answer to give him.

I knew that Tortosa had been an important city in the medieval age, and then were the origins of the coat of arms, but I didn’t know more details about it. So I decided to look for some information and a former teacher recommended me an old book called Armas y blasones de la fidelisima y ejemplar ciudad de Tortosa. That book, which was written in the 19^th century, explained briefly this question.

In the old times, the first coat of arms was a ship with its sail in the wind. Nowadays, you can still see this symbol in some places like Chamber of Commerce or as a decoration seal in the city festivals.

The current coat of arms is a tower and is dated from 12^th century, when Muslims where defeated and the count Ramon Berenguer IV gave the city its traditions and customs, as a way to rule by itself again. It’s a silver tower, with a door, two windows and four battlements. The tower doesn’t correspond to any exact localization in the city. Therefore, it’s a generic symbol very often used in heraldry with medieval foundations.

The background is a red field (‘field gules’ in heraldic terminology) in a diamond-shaped box. The rhombus is a quite extended shape in the cities and villages because of their female condition, and the diamond shape has this connotation too. You can check most of the cities coats of arms and they have this shape.

In relation to the crown and palms, they were given by King Philip IV during the 17^th century, much more lately. So in a strict sense, neither crown nor palms belong to the original coat of arms. Both symbols have a monarchic meaning.

Thanks to an Australian guy we know more details about our city symbol, because if he hadn't ask me I wouldn't have done this tiny research ;)

How to get your password in CentrosNet

If you want to check your qualifications, you will have to click Accés a CentrosNet, in EOI Tortosa site. There you will have to fill some fields: user, which is your birthdate in DD/MM/YYYY format; password, which is you ID number (DNI) without letter; and there will be a third field, Contrasenya Personal d´Alumne/Tutor. This field is a novelty, because it wasn’t the past year. How can I get this password? 

If you click “I forgot my password” button you won’t solve the problem because your password has not been generated yet; so this option doesn't work. To get the password, you have to fill the first and second fields —birthdate and ID number—, and you have to leave the third field blank. Then click “enter” and type the password. Choose a password: it must be at least six and maximum eight characters long. Finally, you will receive an e-mail to active your password.

Go to “CentrosNet” again and fill the fields using your recent generated password. Now you will be able to access and check your qualifications :) Qualifications will be available from June 27th.

Important notice: Remind of keeping this password in order to formalize the enrolment and other future procedures on EOI.

Garbo, the Catalan spy who tricked Hitler and saved D-Day

One of the key moments of World War II, the Normandy landings, took place 72 years ago today; and today is also a day to remember and vindicate the figure of Joan Pujol Garcia, the most fabulous double agent of the World War II. Pujol, whom MI5 named as "Garbo" and the Abwehr as "Arabel" built a ghost network of twenty-seven subagents that never existed but which managed to intoxicate the German intelligence services.

Operation Overlord began the morning of June 6, 1944 —the D-day—. The allied armies under the command of the five-star general Dwight David Eisenhower invaded Normandy coast with the largest fleet ever assembled in military history. The landing was the prelude to the night attack of the 101st and 82nd Airborne American divisions, who took their aircraft on different positions of the Normandy coast. It was 0:15 pm on day 6. A few hours later, about 6:30 am, the first units began to land on the beach in Normandy, divided into five sectors, with codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword.

The key element of the operation was to make the German General Staff believe that the main landing place would be the Pale of Calais, 150 km to the north of Normandy. A task executed by double agents working for the allied army, including Garbo. At four in the morning of June 6th, and with Eisenhower’s go-ahead, Garbo informed the German landing in Normandy. This was calculated as the Germans received the information, but when it was too late, when the invasion was already underway. Garbo also transmitted that, according to three agents of its network —agents that obviously didn’t exist—, possibly the Normandy landings was only a distraction, and that the main invasion would take place in Calais, with 75 divisions and 19 brigades positioned in southern England. At this point, the British had thoroughly prepared a veritable atrezzo army made from plastic, rubber and cardboard to make this information seem credible.

Despite the deception, the experienced Panzer divisions, the fortified defensive positions and artillery batteries imposing the "Atlantic Wall" caused lots of devastation in expeditionary troops, especially in Omaha. But the German commandment had its eyes on Calais and several armoured and infantry divisions were moved up there to support the main hypothetical landing. This was crucial to release pressure and allow the allies to consolidate the invasion of the French west coast, with subsequent landing of new troops. Five weeks after D-Day, Caen was already under Anglo-American control. The liberation of France, along with the major Soviet offensive in the east meant the seeds of defeat for the Third Reich.

After the war, Garbo went to South America, where he lived for 40 years in the absolute anonymity. In the 80s was located by an English journalist expert in espionage and travelled to Europe, where he told his story and was received by veterans of MI5. Joan Pujol Garcia died in Venezuela in 1989.

To imagine the lives that would have been lost without his deception enters the field of history-fiction, but there is no doubt whatever that had a decisive role, and like many other people in World War II, he became history with some discretion. That he is the only person who has been decorated by both sides in the same war (Order of the British Empire and the Iron Cross of the Third Reich), reveals the uniqueness of our character and makes imperative our tribute and remembrance.


Manel
Tortosa, Catalonia. June 6th, 2016

Keeping our English afloat

Hi there! This blog has been created by students from EOI Tortosa (3rd level English), as a way to practice English during the summer. We have finished classes recently, and we won't start them again until September; so if we don't want to forget many things we have learned, we must keep practicing! In order to, we have designed a plan to train our English skills during next several weeks on the four main flanks: reading, listening, speaking and writing.

READING. We will borrow a few books from library. There are many books, with differents genres. It's a proper way to assimilate and consolidate the grammar contents, and much easier and funnier than revise the whole notes from the course. Remember: EOI library will be open during June (only mornings, until 1.15 pm) and will be closed on July and August. You can borrow until five books and you will be able to return in September. As well, you can find many English-written books in other libraries. Finally, you also can read the posts that will be published here ;)

LISTENING. It's the weakest part for many of us, so it would be a good idea to practise listenings. As teacher showed, there are lots of resources on the Internet: 6 minutes English is fantastic because they speak easy and you can read the transcription (you can find the podcast in the BBC Learning English site or in YouTube); you also can watch documentaries, just type "documentary English subtitles" in YouTube and you will get a lot of them, choose your favourite subjects; watching movies or TV series in original versions (teacher recommended us Miranda, Friends and New Girl, because of their non-excessive difficulty) and paying attention to the lyrics from your favourite songs are other funny ways to practise listening.

SPEAKING. It's the hardest skill to train, because you need to find English-speaking people, and that is not always easy. Just take all opportunities you can to speak: talk to some tourist or foreign people living in your city or maybe when you are abroad on a trip; and there a few places you can go to do conversation with natives: Forn de la Canonja, Tradicionàrius, Botànic and public libraries of Roquetes and Tortosa. And of course, you can meet with people from your class to have a drink and speak in the "super hot chair" mode :)

WRITING. This is the main reason of our blog. We want to write some compositions as we used to do in class. We wrote around eight compositions during the course, why not to keep writing and publishing here? It's a good way to revise and maintain our vocabulary and grammar structures. Just choose a subject you like and write a few lines. Actually, I'm doing right now meanwhile I'm writting this post ;) Unfortunately, there will be no correction from a capable teacher, but the mere fact of writing will help us to revise and remember important things in our English career.

Welcome and go ahead!


If you want to publish your compositions here, please let me know it and I will enable you as an editor. You can post a comment or send us an e-mail to inpresentperfect@tortosins.com.