Visit to York

Over the weekend before I had my second hockey tournament, my family and I visited the city of York for a night. It's a great city, with diverse restaurants and a rich, Viking based history.

Whilst visiting the Viking Centre, we went on a rather cheesy ride, which is kind of like the haunted house rides you get sometimes at funfairs. However, this one informed visitors about Vikings, and they had figures of Vikings built that, apparently, were based on Vikings' skeletons that they found in York.

Soon afterward, before we went to check into our hotel, we visited the famed city wall, which was the slightly demolished city wall surrounding the old city of York. Of course, the city has been expanded very far out of those walls.

The wall itself had little slits in it for archers to shoot arrows out of. Since they were so thin, very rarely did an enemy's arrow get through. Interestingly enough, some of the slits were longer than others. I suspect this was because some were for powerful longbows, and some for the highly accurate, but smaller, crossbows.

After we had checked into our hotel, I remembered that the final of the Six Nations, Wales v Ireland, was on, so Dad and I turned on the tube and watched that for a while. Once Ireland had won the Grand Slam, we had some dinner at a Chinese buffet (much to the disappointment of Mum) and went to bed.

In the morning, we groggily picked ourselves up and went down to breakfast at the hotel. The hot food did not seem to be open, so we munched on cereals, toast and rolls, and drank coffee and hot chocolate.

We would have liked to stay for lunch in York, but then we wouldn't make the tournament in time. So we drove back to Cambridge and settled back down into our normal, daily routine.

The End is Near

Already, 2 thirds of the year have gone by and it seems like the first day of school was yesterday! All my lessons, sports matches, and days off have been a blur, and now I just have the Summer Term left to enjoy school. It's always like that, isn't it. When you are doing something in the present, it usually seems very long. Yet once you've finished doing that something, it seems like a blink of an eye.

House Points and Discipline

At school, we have these things called house points. It's where if you do something very good or excellent, you get a house point. The reason that they are called 'house points' is because all of the house points that your house earns altogether is added up at the end of term and whichever house has the most wins. We would never get anything like it in America.

According to my sister, you can also lose HPs. In our year it never happens, but apparently it does in Year 3. She was on a field trip recently, and apparently, one of her classmates had lost 2 HP for throwing a rock at some cows. He got 'told off' for that. I really don't understand why being told off is so horrible. I mean, you just get some sort of lecture from a teacher and that's it. You don't have to sit out for a while or anything.

However, the funniest story that I have heard from my sister about discipline was when her class was doing PE. The same boy was talking out of turn repeatedly, so the PE teacher sent him to change back into uniform, sit down on the bench and do handwriting practice. I really do find that consequence, especially for PE, strange.

Chocolate and Graffiti

For this half term, we visited Belgium for 3 days, just because we are in England and we want to cram as much of Europe as we can into this year.

Some of the things we saw in Brussels were chocolate, Tintin museums, and lots of EU buildings. These were very much expected. The chocolate was wonderful (I mean, what else could it be in Belgium?), with lots of shops sprinkled about the city. We would usually come in, try to pronounce the chosen variety of chocolate in as best French as we could, pointing to the kind we wanted. On the second-to-last day of the visit, we made an excursion to the grocery store, where we stocked up on as much chocolates as we could get our hands on.

We then had a taste-test for the kids, which was comparing whether we kids liked the hand-made Neuhaus chocolates, which were much more expensive, and the machine-made chocolate from Leonidas. We threw a couple of grocery store chocolates in as well, just for more fun. We were blindfolded, just so that we wouldn't see which chocolates we were eating.

Our (my sister and I) genes may be similar, but our taste buds are very different. She ranked the hand made chocolate as the best, whereas I ranked it as the worst. It was vice versa with the machine-made chocolate. Did Neuhaus not do particularly well with their chocolate? Or is it just that I have bad taste?

One thing that we don't see in Cambridge a lot, and in which we were not expecting too much of in Brussels was graffiti. This is highly exaggerated, but I think there was more graffiti in Brussels than in the whole of Manhattan!

The artists must have been really desperate to find space for it. As in, extremely desperate. Someone scribbled some letters onto a bush!

Also, I often saw the same graffiti artist's design/word around town. For example, there was one guy who would put "Doug" on various walls around the lower part of the city. Another person put "Artist..." in the same areas of Brussels. Also, the same spots round and about the city were used, making the people who made the graffiti almost dog-like (no offense to them) in a way, in the fact that they marked their special design/word around the city.

Snowfall

There was a huge reaction at school about the snow today and on Monday, mainly because no one had ever seen much of it before. What was seriously surprising, though, is that at break, the teachers let us have a gigantic snowball fight in our uniforms, and yet in America, they didn't even let us set a toe onto the snow in our regular clothing. There are some things I really don't understand about my hometown.

However, the snow made biking much slower, especially on Tuesday, when all the snow from Monday had frozen, along with the bike-prints, just like footprints in hardened cement. This made the ride
a) slippery; my sister fell down once on Wednesday
b) bumpy, because of all the bike-prints
c) slushy, when the melted ice mixed with the mud
But of course, when we came home from school Lydia and I were rewarded by playing in the snow, making a snowman and an attempted snow fort, although there really wasn't enough snow the make one of those.

Cirque de Soilel

For this special treat, we tromped up to London for the day and noodled around in Hyde Park before entering the Royal Albert Hall, Albert being Queen Victoria's husband. There are many, many elaborate memorials for Albert, all built by Victoria, in that particular area of London.

The actual circus was great from the first second, with a range of acts, including a man rolling around in a hamster wheel-like contraption around the stage, to innocent people from around the audience having to perform a romantic scene. I would highly recommend going if you ever get the chance, but tickets are quite expensive.

Ski trip

Wow. That trip to Austria was better than I expected, yet worse in some ways. Bad news, the line for the ski lift was absolutely horrible! In Britain, everyone's all polite and 'after you' -ish, but here, if you don't push, you don't get anywhere.

To tell you the truth, it was worth it when we got to the top, with generous amounts of snow all week. There was poor visibility on Thursday and Friday, but good enough so that we wouldn't crash into people too often.

Evening entertainment consisted of a variety of activities, ranging from bowling in town to picking a small box up with your teeth, which got smaller every round. All of the activities were entertaining indeed, but some of them not the most, um, hygienic, we'll say. Some of them don't need mentioning, so I won't talk about them. Anyway, if I gave the evening activities in general a mark out of ten, they would rate at a 8.5, 1 point taken off for the slightly disgusting activities, 0.5 for some of them that did not involve many children at all.

So you're thinking, "Oh, this kid's had a pretty nice ski trip." Think again. The journey to and fro Austria really was terrifyingly uncomfortable. I could never get decent sleep on the bus because the lights would stay on till about 10 or so, and I could never seem to find a comfortable position. The DVDs that the teachers played lasted pretty late as well.

So if I gave the whole ski trip a mark out of forty, it would be 32.5. 2 for the journey, 8.5 for evening activities, 9 for the skiing, 3 for the queues, and ten for everything else combined.