The Hidden Gem Of London Sailing Courses

When I announced to a family friend that I was attending a two-day sailing course in Pimlico, his response was sceptical. 

"But what body of water would that be in? It can't be the Thames, that would be too busy and you'd probably catch Weil's Disease!"

Well, this was it, the Westminster Boating Base.

*this image isn't mine

Well, to be precise, we didn't sail right next to the Houses of Parliament; we were closer to Battersea Power Station and Grosvenor Bridge. But that's not really my point. My point is that we were sailing on the Thames! I, a beginner who'd only ever sailed in a shoebox on a dreary reservoir in Essex, sailed on a major thoroughfare yesterday and lived to tell the tale! Yup, no Weil's Disease (the Thames is apparently the cleanest metropolitan river in the world, according to our instructors) or being run over by ferries (almost all the larger boats we spotted were moored). I survived.

In many ways, it's strange that this place 1) has such minimal advertising and 2) is so unheard of! Why am I probably the first blogger in the world ever to rave about it on the World Wide Web? Don't other people see that there's nowhere else like it in London, or maybe even all the riverside cities in the world (correct me if I'm wrong; I haven't researched this "fact")? But I guess there is a good side to this in the lack of crowds (our group had only eight people, with two or three on each boat). To further prove this point, I also tried a popular kayaking centre in the Docklands, which had all the fancy websites and gushing admirers, but realistically, it's just packed with about seventy kids waiting around, half of whom end up without their desired place on the course. So maybe a small centre like WBB could do fine without any publicity. But I still think the location deserves it.

Anyway, enough of the publicity debate. Now onto what we actually did when we got out onto the water. Well, the format was actually a lot better and more educational than my previous sailing course, with everyone on the boat given about half an hour each to sail independently and get individual pointers from the instructor (who was on the boat, a fact which, although technically for safety reasons, I think was an improvement on the shoebox sailing course, where we were all thrust out onto a lake alone without a clue what to do). And the instruction itself was actually some of the most friendly and helpful I've ever received from these activity centre-type places, and that's probably a result of the lack of crowds meaning these often-long-suffering people aren't tormented by difficult kids day-in-day-out. Or maybe that's just me being cynical, and they're all actually genuinely nice people. We shall never know.

So I can now proudly say I achieved my RYA Stage 1 just downstream from Battersea Power Station. And I can cleat a halyard. The latter which, to my layman level of expertise, sounds a lot more impressive than the former.

-DP :)

PS We're going up to Scotland for a week in a couple of days, and the presence or absence of Wi-Fi is so far unconfirmed. But I haven't spontaneously combusted if I don't post for a week or so :).

The Gentle Giants: Real and Artificial!

A return to my unforgettable trip to Sri Lanka now: this is quite a long time in the past now, but on Christmas Eve we visited the Elephant Orphanage, which is basically what it says in the name, a home for orphaned elephants near Sri Lanka's second city of Kandy. I didn't have time to blog on the actual day, but I thought it was too awesome not to write something about, so here it comes...

I don't know about you, but I think this picture is SOOO CUTE! They look caring yet violent at the same time!

This is me and my dad (the people in orange shirts are the workers at the orphanage) tentatively yet excitedly feeling the rough, robust skin of a beautiful Indian elephant. If you look closely, you can see that this elephant has wonderfully unique pale pink marks on its trunk and ears, a pacifying mark on such a terrifying (to some) beast.

An elephant devours rare melons among piles of leaves!

 

I love both these elephant calf pictures. The top ones look so sweet as they nuzzle (or fight!) each other, yet the expressions of the bottom ones are completely different, entirely trustworthy of everything around them.

       

Elephants are not the national animal of Sri Lanka (lions are), but elsewhere on my travels in this beautiful island nation I saw enough depictions of these gentle giants to suggest that they could and should be...

This majestic trunked creature is a statue of a real elephant called Raja, who was a Sri Lankan national treasure due to his participation in Buddhist ceremonies and processions (we visited many Buddhist temples during the trip, which I loved looking round, and this statue was preserved in a museum next to one of them). Most famously, he carried the famous tooth relic (supposedly a fragment of Buddha's tooth) in many processions. Below him are some golden elephant heads from the same temple.

Here are two very elegant elephant depictions, on walls and gates in Kandy, which I think should be dubbed "the elephant sculpture capital of the world".

- DP :)

PS 83% of you voted for "Yes" in my "Would you eat a blue fruit?" poll, so you're obviously an adventurous bunch! Vaguely connected to elephants, my next poll is "Would you close zoos?", a freer poll that should allow you to be more opinionated.

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!

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 ;) 

Unknown Ways of Spending Outdoor Days

As the weather's warming up now, I thought I'd do an outdoor activity review to fit with my indoor activity one of Junk, and it's a review of one of my favourite activities, something I've been doing for nearly six months now and it's very addictive. Hope you like my review, and if you try Geocaching, enjoy that too!

Geocaching

When they're very young, everyone wants to find a tiny bit of treasure languishing in a hidden corner of beautiful countryside (and, in some cases, cities). But, sadly, not many of us manage to achieve that dream. However, thanks to the twelve-year-old, international craze of Geocaching, just a few of us just might do. The most basic form of Geocaching involves walking around an area (usually the countryside, sometimes urban areas), using a GPS device or smartphone to find containers (ranging in size from film canisters and the occasional diamond-encrusted 3cm tub to large buckets and ammo boxes) of small trinkets (such as keyrings, plastic toys and Trackables, which are trinkets created to pass from cache to cache) known as caches hidden just out of plain sight, and subsequently registering your find on the Geocaching website. And of course all the best things in life are two-way processes, so Geocachers can also create their own caches in their local area for others to try and find, and best of all, the whole basic membership, containing opportunities to both hide and seek caches, is absolutely free (there is also a premium membership, costing $30 - approximately £19 - but there are few obvious benefits). In the time between now and when it started, Geocaching has grown to be much more complex, with current cache types including Cache Series (an often themed route of several Traditional Caches), Event Caches (a formal or informal meeting of Geocachers) and Virtual Caches (intangible caches involving going to a location and answering an online question about it).

Geocaching is an ingenious idea that makes all walks considerably more fun, and even the most un-outdoorsy person will never tire of endlessly searching around and rifling through Tupperwares. If I had to say one thing against it, it would be that geocaches are always impossible to find in cities, for ever-present tall buildings seem to make it difficult for the GPS to find the satellites, so I think geocaching is better off just done in the countryside. However, now  I've become so addicted to it, I also ponder how much I was missing never knowing about it.
- DP :)

Go to www.geocaching.com to sign up now.

Check out Dramatis Persona's (geocaching alias daftydodo) Cache Series Stour Path Sidetrack.

A geocache - this image isn't mine

Unknown Ways Of Spending Indoor Days

Snow is falling throughout the country and many neighbouring ones too, and it's not fun snow, i.e. snowman building and snowball throwing snow. It is, in our case, hard, icy, frozen snow, which greatly increases some of my family's and my reluctance to take a breath of fresh air. If you have similar difficulties, or are stuck at home because of rain, snow, ice etc., I've reviewed a fantastic, if slightly out of the ordinary, card game that is great for days like this, that I think many blog readers will enjoy if they're bored of Scrabble. 
- DP :)
P.S. Some of you may have realised that the prints in the snow were the mark made by a rabbit's feet and tail.

 Junk

When you hear descriptions of this now very rare card game, you'd think it only appropriate for those raring to break onto the antiques market and wanting to have some light-hearted patter practice while having fun with friends and family. However, antiques and flea markets have never been much of an interest to me (although they have been to my Mum), yet I took to this excellent game very well. Ever since my Dad received it for Christmas, my family and I have used much of our free time playing Junk, due to its extreme addictiveness. Its gameplay is very similar to an antique dealer's life; players sell their selection of thirteen different types of antiques (e.g. bureau, eagle table centrepiece, cabinet) in pairs to either a "museum" (really just the centre of the table) or the "public" (just the other players), and try to make a profit from what they've bought from other players in order to achieve the objective of having the highest credit at the end of the game. The catch is that the items are either "Genuine" or "Junk", and players don't know which until it's too late. Of course, junk items cannot be sold to the museum, and if an item isn't sold, the failed seller earns its price if it's genuine, and loses its price if it's junk. The tension builds high towards the end of the game, because every purchase counts and even the tiniest blunder can be the difference between winning and losing. The laughs, the opportunities for over-imaginative patter and the frequent light-hearted embarrassment at genuine-ness giveaways make this a wonderful game that's suitable for all ages and for lovers, haters, experts and novices of the antique market. The only things I have against it are that it can become predictable who will win and lose a little too early on in the game, and with 78 genuine items and 26 junk ones, Junk does take longer than most games and there's no real variation in play throughout the game.

Junk cards

N.B. No real money or antiques is involved in this game, only cards and tokens.

Junk box

Only available second-hand. Starting price on eBay: £1.99 + £1.75 postage