I am I and my circumstance

The Roman Castle and the Theatre of Sagunto

Well... who am I? As the philosopher Ortega y Gasset said: "I am I and my circumstance" but what more could I say about me? My real name is José though almost everyone calls me Pepe (it’s a diminutive, as in the Italian names Giuseppe=Peppe), I am 20 years old and study Translation and Interpreting because I've always enjoyed learning languages. The truth is that I'm not a very interesting person. I consider myself a person that has a screw loose, but I can be a bit shy when I don’t know the people around me. I was born in Sagunto, Spain and now I am studying in Graz thanks to the ERASMUS programme.

With regard to my hobbies, I love theatre, when I was a kid I dreamed with being an actor. As I grew up my passion for theatre led me to join a theatre course in my town. I still remember our first improvisation match. For those who do not know what this means, a improvisation match is a “battle” between teams in which each team makes a representation without any script, just a few keywords given by the public that thanks to the imagination of the actors end up becoming a small performance. The second year of theatre we did a play that I can remember like it was yesterday, it was the first time I felt that the theatre was part of me.

In my room I don’t have many things because in two suitcases in which only let you put 23kg of weight in one of them and 8kg in the other there can be only a few things. But something I could bring with me from my country was a "estelada", a flag that maybe you have seen lately in the news, is the flag that represents the Catalan people fighting for their freedom. Yes, in Valencia we also speak Catalan and some of us feel that we are more siblings of Catalan people than of Spanish. Another thing that I brought from Sagunto is a gift that my friends made me, is a banner with pictures and their messages. In the photo we are in Graz, some of them came to me this February and the truth is I had a great time.

Coming back to the Ortega y Gasset’s quote (“I am I and my circumstance”) and what it means: I'm not just me, I have also part of Graz inside me, part of Sagunto, part of my culture and language, and of everything that surrounds me; in short, my circumstance.