News on the Mo-town

Soon it will be three months since we came, and we barely noticed it. Lots of things have happened, and it's not much long ago since we started to settle in the new home, getting to know the places around us, etc. Talking about surroundings, we can say we are very lucky. Not only the neighborhood is really nice, but our house is also in walking-distance to some shops, pharmacy etc. which living in the States, trust me, it's luck. :)

Today I decided to pick some interesting news from the city and the country, that way you get to know better what is going on here. Some of them are nice, some others are hopeless, but nevertheless worth knowing them. 

The first thing I want to talk about is the so called "March Madness". That refers to the basketball championship played by the NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association). 

This tournament is played by the best 68 college basketball teams, that means, the players are students and not professionals (yet). Believe it or not, lots of people prefer this games to be NBA. Also, the tournament structure is crazy, because it is a SINGLE-elimination tournament. Every phase happen in one day, as follows:

• First round: from 68 to 64 teams, here the games are still very equally (that means that teams that have similar capabilies actually play against each other for a place)
• Second round (round of 64): These are games where very good teams play very bad ones, which make it sometimes very interesting if the bad teams have luck and defeat the good ones. The winners pass to the next round, that means, that day there is 32 games, 32 winners, and 32 losers.
• Third round: 32 teams play each other, only 16 pass to the next round (the "sweet sixteen")
• Regional semifinals: 8 games leave 8 winners that pass to the next round (the "elite eight")
• Regional finals: 4 games, the final 4 go to the semi final
• National semifinal
• National championship 

 Michigan has two big teams, Michigan and Michigan State. Under no circumstances you should confuse those two, if you ask Michigan State people if they support Michigan team, they will want to hit you in the face. These are the logos of the two universities.

Michigan University (blue and yellow) is located in Ann Arbor, a nice city just about 40 minutes from where we live. Michigan State (green) is represented with the "S" from Spartans, they are located in East Lansing.

With the name of the Championship you can imagine how excited the Americans are, especially because most of them support the college they went to.

With the good feeling of the basketball in the mouths, I get to other kind news that unfortunately don't make us as happy. But the truth is that we live close to a city that has big problems, and after three months here we have been exposed to some of the bad news about the present and future of Detroit.

Something that happened recently might be enough to describe the situation that the city is living. A few weeks ago, the city's governor declared a fiscal state of emergency in Detroit. Altough there have been movements against this decision, it has been made in a dictatorial way, say the citizens, who just had voted down the emergency manager law last november. 

The fact is that the city is constantly in risk of bankruptcy. In 2009, Chrysler's bankruptcy led to tens of thousand of workers being fired. Since that, there have been improvement, however the number of city jobs has still decreased. The city is facing a monumental crisis. Public transportation is in an abysmal state, lighting is out in large sections of the city, and streets are in gross disrepair.

However, the citizens don't think that the solution is to have an emergency manager in charge, since his task will only be that the banks recover the big debt from the citizens. Like it is happening in some European countries, the real problem of the people is overseen, and the first priority is to save the banks (this might sound familiar to the Spaniards...).

Looking into statistics, all taken from this very interesting link, Detroit is a city that has lost 97% of its property value in the last 8 years. Moreover, the population has decrease from 1.6 million  in 1960, to 700.000 in 2010.  Even the last 10 years have meant 25% decrease in population.

In spite of the great depression that Detroit is living, there are immense efforts to help the resurgence of the city. There are a lot of amenities that take place in downtown Detroit (as reported in a previous entry, we went to the Muse concert in Joe Louie Arena), as well as restaurants, theaters, museums etc. There are also many buildings under construction, and planned to make the city more amusing. It is desired that more people move to the city center, which is necessarily joint to the target of having a new start in the Mo-town, that used to be a dream city, and has been falling down for decades. 

We will surely witness small changes in Detroit, but 3 years are certainly not enough to reestablish the equilibrium in this very distressed city. Happily, the basketball tournament can make people forget temporarily the problems in their society.

 Lots of love to our readers!