Roggilandet

-Passport please!



This is the border to Roggilandet. In Spanish you say "mi país" when you speak about the country where you are from. When you translate it literarily into English it becomes: "my country", which sounds like you are referring to your own country which only belongs to you.

When my colleagues in Puebla asked me when I was going back to "my country" I didn´t realize how suitable that phrase actually was. As a matter of fact, I do have my own country and it is called the Roggiland.

The Roggiland is located in the South West of Sweden just a few minutes walk from where I grew up. I don´t remember from where I got the name; Roggilandet, but my friends and family still use the name when they talk about this place, close to the lake.



Only very special friends were invited to come in and play with me in Roggilandet. There we would pretend that we were archeologist, and every trace that we found was a sign that this had been an ancient kingdom where kings and queens had lived and fought many years ago.

We were convinced that the piles of stones located around the fields, were graves were soldiers had been buried and inside two of the larger hills, the Swedish and the Danish king were resting. I never became an archeologist. I guess I was more interested in the stories that I created, together with my friends, rather than trying to find out if they were true or not. And to be honest, when I walk by those hills today, I still somehow believe that the Swedish and Danish kings were buried there and that one day some archeologist will discover the big treasure.

Some years ago, long after I had stopped playing with my friends in Roggilandet, one of my friends told me that she had brought a guy she was dating to Roggilandet. I remember how upset that made me. How could she let a a person that I hardly knew inside my country? I was around 25 that time.

I guess we are all protective when it comes to the things that we consider ours and this must be the root to all the border conflicts around the world.

Here comes the first part of four of the documentary with Marco Antonio Flores Martínez, where he is speaking about how he left Mexico to go to the USA.



(I am so proud I finally managed to add subtitles)
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The Dream Day Poem by Jesús Herrera

A while ago I got a Dream Day poem from a young poet called Jesús Herrera in Puebla. It was written in Spanish and I was going to translate it into English once my Spanish had improved. But before I was finished with my course, a young journalist from Mexico City; Gabriel Infante, who had found Proyecto Zapato on Youtube, read my blog, discovered the poem, offered to translate it for me. It was of course an offer I could not resist.

Thank you Jesús and Gabriel for your contribution to the Dreamdayproject!

Here comes the Dream Day poem translated into English:


How dramatic can perfection be?

How monotonous or
ephemeral?

Could I contemplate the ether
of the fountains

and the grid of a dream
of exiles;

What justices that claim
nostalgia

without gods perception
or the empty chairs,

dismantle the wooden
coffins

and protects their smile against
melancholic beams

and shoes stories,
without laces on the asphalt

nor residual of slaves,
to abolish the oblivion in each

estimated steps,
reciting to new vicious

of wolfs and
veiled anarchists

in this battle against,
human structure,

dream day…
dismantle dictatorship
and all the utopias


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Sounds from Puebla

This is a beautiful song which I heard in Puebla some time before I went back to Sweden. They say that a picture says more than a hundred words, but doesn´t a sound say more than a hundred pictures?


(click here to watch more videos on Youtube>>)

This is what I sometimes hear when I open my front-door and what you should listen for in Puebla if you are hungry and want to have some empanadas:



And if you have a crave for ice-cream? Try to locate this man shouting "Heladoooo!":



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