NO WAR

This week I've begun to receive postcards on Tuesday, but I love the two cards from soniasadin and nancy.

From Pamplona, soniasadin has sent me one of my favourite paintings, Guernica, by Picasso, became in symbol of the horrors of war. Picasso painted it in 1937 at the height of the Spanish Civil War. The town of Guernica was bombed on April 26th, 1937.

Nancy from China has sent me a beautiful UNESCO Site for the "Spain to the Rest of the World" tag. It is the traditional village of Xidi. The Ancient Villages in Southern Anhui, Xidi and Hongcun, were declared World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 2000, because they "preserve to a remarkable extent the appearance of non-urban settlements of a type that largely disappeared or was transformed during the last century. Their street plan, their architecture and decoration, and the integration of houses with comprehensive water systems are unique surviving examples.

The villages of Xidi and Hongcun are graphic illustrations of a type of human settlement created during a feudal period and based on a prosperous trading economy. In their buildings and their street patterns, the two villages of southern Anhui reflect the socio-economic structure of a long-lived settled period of Chinese history. The traditional non-urban settlements of China, which have to a very large extent disappeared during the past century, are exceptionally well preserved in the villages of Xidi and Hongcun.