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.

Christmas Time's a comin'...

I really like how much everybody here in England is into the Christmas spirit. Everyone is very jolly about it, and the younger children in our school have put on partly interactive shows just to spice up every one's feelings. The Year 3 production was a wonderful, slightly modified version of the Nutcracker, which was executed beautifully. I didn't get to see the Years 1 and 2 show, but I imagine that it was wonderful as well. Above is our recent trip to an ice skating rink in Cambridge.

Not just our school, but the town has caught Christmas fever as well. Christmas lights were hung up along Trinity Street quite a while ago now, and all over England there have been church services celebrating the beginning of Advent. All the stores have sections just for Christmas-like things, and I find that it is impossible to talk to anybody without drifting to the topic of Christmas. Especially since it has been snowing lately, just like the stereotype of a Christmas morning.

Cycle Heaven 2

It has been very interesting going through all the stages of biking to school. Here is the list of steps I have taken so far:

1. Finding your way to school - I was still getting used to getting to school, trying not to get lost
2. Finding different routes to go to school - so far I have found 5 different ways of getting to school
3. Biking home from school with sports kit and without basket - I eventually figured out that I could plop it on my handlebars. I felt awkward with people looking at me as if I'm some weirdo
4. Biking home from school in the dark - Daylight savings time made biking home from school a lot more difficult. My dad bought some lights for my bike, though
5. Biking home from school in the dark with my sports kit - This one's a bit tricky. I discover that my sports kit doesn't block my light or my sight at it's position on the handlebars

All my problems so far have been resolved - but who knows what will come next?

This isn't Cambridge anymore

Last Saturday was the start of a one-week vacation for our school, so we decided to go to the Lake District, "the most beautiful corner of the country". And it certainly was. Our schedule was usually as follows: have breakfast at the B&B, which was bacon, egg, sausage, tomato, baked beans and mushrooms (YUM!), have a hike in the morning, have lunch, have a hike in the afternoon, and collapse on your bed (or cot, if you happened to be me) and you would instantly become just as good as any old guy knocked out cold. Here are some Lake District pics:

Eagle eye: A view of the town we were staying in, which was called Ambleside

Winging it: An interesting bird we found in Beatrix Potter's garden, thought to be a robin

Falling water: This was the first time we saw this waterfall, yet the second time we took this hike

Heading downhill: The last hike of the week was with my sister's friend (left), who has a house in the Lake District. This shows her talking with my visiting grandmother.

Here, the food was exceptionally decent, the hikes were spectacular, and the views were just indescribable, but Ambleside was just a bit too crowded. Most people seemed to be families with kids, which was not so in other crowded places. Turns out that all of the schools in England, every single one, they all have the same vacation times as the other schools. A lot of those families must have wanted to go to the Lake District, because at our first night, all the restaraunts were jammed and we just squeezed in at a place called Lucy4, which had a very cheesy menu. Some of the sections of the menu were called Carni-four and Herbi-four. (get it?)
My grandmother was confused about Carni-four because she thought that you could chose 4 things from that section, but it was really just a pun for carnivore. Anyway, we reserved for another restaurant so we wouldn't be stuck at Lucy4 again. Surprisingly, we did not see too many other hikers on the trails, so that was nice. Hope we get to visit Lake District again!