Sunday
morning in bed, had breakfast in bed too and remembered when I used to do the
same in Garagoa -that is a little town 4 hours away from Bogotá D.C. in
Colombia and also my hometown. I used to read in bed and before breakfast all stories that talked
about distant hot cities by the beach. The memories of the sound of the rain
against the window and the unstoppable plots of the stories were still fresh,
as if they had happened yesterday and remembering those memories so vividly
despite the time and distance had a taste of unavoidable nostalgia. After
having some late lunch, my landlady invited us to go to the beach...the beach! Up
to this point of my stay in Bootle, I
didn't know there was a beach near my neighbourhood. She asked us to get ready and we (me and Ann, my flatmate who had woken up in a great
mood) just took our cameras but my landlady suggested to wear wellies and
coats. That was the end of my excitement: No heat or paradise weather as I had
read in my morning bed stories. I didn't
know what to expect from Crosby then. Off we drove there without many expectations and after going
over a grassy sand dune, I MET THE SEA!!!!!! For the first time in my entire
life! It was cold and windy and there were "quite a few" iron men
standing forever in the beach. A master piece, my landlady said. For me, it was
a kind of intervention to the landscape, as Christo did but in a smaller scale.
Since it was the first time in the beach, I tried to reach the waves to contemplate
how my wellies sunk in the damp grey sand that contained tons of dead starfish
and starfish arms and long shaped shells. Some of them were still alive so I
and my landlady's daughter and niece went on a mission: taking the still alive
starfish back to the sea. We had no equipment of any kind -just our wellies and our hands. So the long
shaped shells became tweezers if we used them as Chinese chopsticks and we
started to pile up still alive starfish. The task seemed quite simple but the
weakness of our tweezers didn't help much and the starfish started to fall on
dry sand and that was very sad to see. We were not saving them at all I said to
the girls. According to the them, the mission was aborted for the sake of the
starfish and because of a strong lack of appropriate tools. The high tide would
accomplish the mission better than any of us together, I said to the girls. In
the meantime, my landlady had a cup of tea to keep warm which I wanted too but
my hands smelled of starfish and that was simply great for my first time in the
beach .
