My Sri Lankan Boxing Day

I didn't mention this on my last post, but my Christmas and New Year this year are being spent in the wonderful island of Sri Lanka. As well as this being the first ever blog post on my new Christmas gift of an iPad (!), since arriving here on the 22nd my family and I have spent Christmas Eve Eve (not a mistake, by this I mean the 23rd) in the capital city of Colombo, Christmas Eve with a host of Indian elephants which I intend to talk about more and show you pictures of, but only can access some of them right now :( and most recently Christmas Day in Kandy, Sri Lanka's second city. More specifically, in one of the biggest Buddhist temples in the world, the Temple of the Tooth, where Buddha's canine tooth is supposedly held. But enough of yesterday, let's talk about today. My 26th December was spent hiking up the large, ancient city of Sigiriya in the middle of the jungle, in surprisingly good condition for its age. However, I'm not going to tell you, I'm going to show you...

This is a from-the-bottom view of the rock that once housed the grand palace of the king of Sri Lanka in 500-600 BC. We climbed this, on an array of steep and often frighteningly fragile metal staircases and walkways!

A very cute ( if you like that sort of thing) monitor lizard I saw on the way up.






A small, walled enclosure, apparently home to the Bo tree, the species under which the Buddha was born.

A beautifully painted image, better than most cave paintings, amazingly done in 500 BC!

My Christmas Decorations - which is your favourite?

Hello trustworthy blog followers, considering the success of the quizzing poll, my next sidebar poll is to decide which of this year's decorations in my house are the nicest (i.e. which should be used again next year). There are five to choose from, so here is the selection (rather traditionally, this poll ends on Twelfth Night, the 6th January, when all decorations must be taken down!):

1) Christmas Tree
My Christmas tree is quite alternative this year, a genuine (dead) tree with its summer leaves taken away from it in winter. I spraypainted it red to get in the festive spirit:

I also decorated it with some stars I made years ago:

And also with some very cute birds!!!

2) Advent Calendar

This year's advent calendar was hand made, which makes a difference to the usual chocolate ones. Each day is an envelope hanging from the tree with an embossed (see earlier post) Roman numeral, and each gift is a decades-old, collectible Christmas stamp from a different country every day! I can never wait to see what will be next!

 Here are just some of the stamps we've had so far (sorry for the poor image quality):

3) Christmas Display Cabinet

This is a display cabinet of Christmas trinkets, new this year, and is in some ways a collection of unusual Christmas goodies from many time periods and countries. It includes several Santa Claus figurines, both fun and scary, various Japanese ornaments and even a rather amusing horse (4th shelf down, far left)!

4) Glass Birds

Also new for this year, I have a set of elegant glass birds, painted in tasteful purples and greens (not together though!). There are lots of different sorts of birds in the set, but the prettiest and rarest is this purple pheasant - great as a table centrepiece and very cute!!!

5) Christmas Card Display

Last but not least, in my bedroom I've put up a line of Christmas cards along my bed head, as much a display of my popularity (joke) as a great decoration idea! Some of them have great designs, too.

So, I've shown you all my decorations, so what are you waiting for?! Vote!!!
- DP :)

P.S. I have great news for history buffs - your trivia subject of choice won our recent poll with 33% of the votes. But bad news for sport, music or film fans - your category came last with no one voting for it!

Guest Blogger!!

Hello again, this time my post's going to be a bit different - this time, it's not from me - it's from, for the very first time on Dramatis Persona, I've got a guest blogger! It's someone in my school, who came over to my house today and showed an interest in my blog. This is all her idea, so over to her...
- DP :)

The life story of a Carrot

Carrots lead a very uninteresting life, and die very young. They start their life as nothing more than a seed and live in a very dark and cold place. He/she will slowly grow like you or me. Roots will start to form and leaves will start to appear. If vegtablealists didn't know this, they have miniature TV screens inside them which they watch when they are bored. Otherwise they have nothing to do. As when they get picked they die, they only live a few months which means that many carrot Twilight fans never got to watch the last movie. :'( At least they will never find out what happened to their friends and family when they died...

Wasn't that a great story from our guest blogger! Who knew what happens to carrots! Thanks so much to our guest blogger, we hope to have more guests soon!

Random Book Knowledge At National Level

I've left the title of this blog post a little mysterious this time, which is quite new for me :), but I'll tell you all about it now. This week, I was a participant in the 2012 Kids' Lit Quiz, which is an international contest for book lovers like myself from 7 countries around the world, concerning knowledge of authors, books and characters, both classic and contemporary. However, what I haven't mentioned yet is that it's all for 10-13 year-olds just like me! 

So, on to my own results... Well, after successfully qualifying for my school's A team, three teammates and I travelled to compete at The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire for the North London heat. This turned out to be a relatively easy, pub-quiz style written with ten themed rounds of ten questions, one of them a picture round (this one was probably our favourite and the only one we received full marks on, themed on classic characters and including film depictions of Robinson Crusoe and Huckleberry Finn among others). Believe it or not, at this heat we actually won by 10 points! And, even better, we managed the unusual feat of beating the Authors Team (basically a group of authors competing just for fun)!

Winning this heat meant we had to attend the National Final just 2 days later, in an incredibly fancy-looking hotel in Coventry with, in my opinion, excessive red and gold furnishings and Tudor-style design. I have a picture at the bottom if you want to have a look. But after photos for local newspapers and parading in to the quiz hall to "And last but not least from North London...", we discovered that the quiz was about to be a thousand times more difficult. I mean, one whole round on literary archetypes seems ridiculously hard, who's going to guess that "a humorous male, known in royal circumstances as a jester" would be a clown! And another equally challenging round followed it: first pages of novels. The kind of thing you have to actually read books to know, that no amount of Ultimate Book Guide for 8-12 year olds reading  and online practice questions could teach me. Still though, despite the fact that we didn't make the world finals in South Africa next July, we came an admirable joint 6th of 17, a result I'm proud of!

- DP :)

P.S. Recently I've made a few updates to my blog, for instance now you can subscribe by email, which is great because you don't need to give any details apart from your email address, and you don't need a Google account. I've also made a poll on the sidebar which, to celebrate the Kids' Lit Quiz, is all about what trivia topic is your favourite! There's also a new translate button at the bottom so everyone in the world can see what I've got to say! oh, and the hotel image isnt mine ;)