Last night's footer & visit to British Empire and Commonwealth Museum

Two of the guys I met at UWE last Friday (with whom I saw last Friday's friendly match of England against Brazil too) asked me if I wanted to come and see the England qualifying match against Estonia in a pub nearby. The first half was rubbish, but Cole's goal was brilliant. After the break England did a lot better (due to Beckham's assists that led to the other two goals scored) and we had a good time after all.


Today Nen and I went to the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, as I had quite an interesting course on the Empire at school last year. The museum has opened a major exhibition on slavery, 'Breaking the Chains', to mark the bicentenary of the abolition of slave trade.
I knew quite a lot about the Empire but the exhibition still provided necessary knowledge about the traumatic history.

As Bristol has been one of the biggest ports, it has had a huge role in the transatlantic slave trade. Bristol merchants were granted the right to trade in slaves in the 17th and 18th century which caused a lot of profit. With the wealth the merchants generated over the slave trade, they were allowed to buy larger premises and bigger ships.

This is a really disturbing picture but it does show the horrible situation on the slave ships from Africa to the sugar plantations in South America as well as Bristol and Liverpool (which became the largest port after Bristol)

Bristol and again ... Wales

Last Monday Nen and I went to Wales to do a bit of a walk near the Brecon Beacons, a mountain range in the south-east of Wales. The Brecon Beacons form the nucleus of the Brecon Beacons National Park, one of three largest parks of Wales. After an enjoyable ride through the surroundings we had lunch first, before we started to do a short but pleasing walk to the south of Brecon, of which a few pictures below.

The Brecon Beacons are named after the practice of lightning beacons (signal fires) on the mountains, to warn of the attacks of the English in the 11th century.
I felt really young there, finding myself amongst a bunch of pensioners, well-equipped with sticks and proper boots to have a good walk in the hills.
We took another route back to Bristol, over the Newer Severn Bridge that spans the River Severn.

I went to Mela - a very good Indian take-away - in the evening and had a proper meal for only a fiver, which is good of course.
After having enjoyed dinner I walked through Montpelier and took some pictures.


Yesterday the neighbours invited Nen, Stan and me for tea, which was really nice. This Friday I'm going to pay a visit to City Academy in Bristol, so there's again something to look forward to.

Cycling in Wales

After the lunch we had in Wales last week, I really wanted to go back to see more of the surroundings of South Wales. I wanted to stay the weekend somewhere in Wales initially, but as the weather would be bad on Sunday and I had to reserve my ticket earlier and I decided to stay only for one day.
I picked up a cycle route at the Tourist Information Centre in Cardiff and prepared myself for the trip in the park near the City Centre of which I took a picture.
From the park you are able to see the huge Cardiff Millennium Stadium

Welsh is totally different from the English language, but some words are rather recognizable for people who speak English

Through the woods and hills I cycled all the way down towards to Dinas Powys, a small and cosy village. I went to a local supermarket where I bought a bottle of water and took a rest at a disused quarry near Coed yr Eglwys.
A good view of the height I had reached by bike - Wales is absolutely beautiful

Unfortunately I had a puncture after having cycled for another half an hour and I was not able to fix my tyre.
I headed back to Cardiff by train and enjoyed the beautiful weather in Sevenoaks Park again. Regrettably I wasn't able to finish my 20-mile cycle route, but at least I can say that I have been cycling in South Wales.
Picture taken just before the Severn tunnel which links South Gloucestershire to Monmouthshire in the south of Wales

University of the West of England

A few weeks ago one of my teachers at Fontys in Tilburg contacted me with Jo Barkham of the University of the West of England, and I asked her whether or not it would be possible to do a course at the University during my stay in Bristol. She told me that the courses would be finished by June but she did invite me to attend a lecture of Andrew Pollard, a man who has been teaching in primary education in England for years. He would give a lecture on 'reflective teaching' which would be quite interesting to attend.
And that's what I did today. On my way to UWE I took a picture of the incredible surroundings near the University.


After meeting Jo Barkham of UWE I attended the lecture which was absolutely interesting, although it was mainly focused on primary education. I was invited to the party afterwards (it turned out to be these students' last lecture at UWE) and had a chat with Andrew Pollard about primary education in the Netherlands. He told me that he is actually going to visit the Netherlands within the forseeable future to give another lecture somewhere in Amsterdam.


Some third year (nearly graduate) students asked me to have lunch with them on the extremely large campus of UWE (and there's four UWE campuses in Bristol!). We had a good chat and some beers and I'm going to watch the England against Brazil football game with two of the guys later today.



Most of the students went home around two, and after having taken some more pictures of the campus I decided to cycle back from UWE to Montpelier, of which I've made a short video.

Lunch in Wales

Nen came up with the idea this morning to have lunch at a pub in Wales, as the weather wouldn't let us going canoeing today. It took about 30 minutes to get from Bristol to the pub by car, finding ourselves amongst the beautiful surroundings of the country of Wales.


A short video (do not mind part of the video being 90% rotated) on Severn Road Bridge. The Severn Road Bridge is a suspension bridge that spans the River Severn from the North of Bristol to Monmoutshire in Wales.




Some more pictures from our little daytrip to Wales.

My plans are to go to Wales this weekend and do some cycling there, so my advice would to keep in touch with my pursuits on my blog.

London Calling

Nen told me last week that I should be able to get rather cheap tickets to go to London by bus via Megabus.com, and so I did. It would take me a bit more than 2 hours to get to London, so I packed my things Sunday morning early and got on the bus.


After having arrived at Green's Court, not far from Victoria Station, I bought a ticket for the underground so that I could go to Marble Arch (where Speaker's Corner would be - next to Hyde Park) right away. Due to the horrible weather (after having extremely good days that week in Brisol) there wasn't any speaker to be seen at Speaker's Corner. Which is a bit of a waste really, as I had quite looked forward to see the speakers.

I decided to head for Oxford Circus, right in the middle of London City Centre. After having enjoyed my first ever Starbucks coffee, I referred to my note on which I had written down the names of a few good shops and their addresses. I had planned my route on googlemaps the day before, so I knew which way to go.



After having done a Starbucks and a few good shops I headed of to the British Museum, which was absolutely amazing. I had never seen such a huge museum before. It seemed that due the terrible weather a lot of other people had decided to pay a visit to the British Museum as well.





After having spent two or three hours at the museum (and there's a lot more to be seen, unfortunately - perhaps some other time) I grabbed a burger, and called it a day, when I took notice of the time and really had to go back to Green's Court.

A visit to Ashton Park School

Chris Gardner, Head teacher of Ashton Park School, had put a lot of effort in creating me a program in which I was invited to attend a variety of classes throughout the day. Three children from different classes have shown me the way me through Ashton Park School.
Since I arrived a little early, Chris Gardner and I talked about what secondary education in general is like in England, about a former teacher at Ashton Park School who went to the Netherlands who was able to have himself speaking Dutch fluently within only a couple of weeks and about a former visit of students and teachers of Fontys Tilburg to Ashton Park School.

We started the day with Maths, given by a teacher who is very strict so that pupils have no opportunity to do other things than Maths during class. The pupils had their own books but didn’t have to bring them to class, as their books were already in the classroom. The idea was that pupils had to do some exercises by themselves but when one was in need for help, other pupils were allowed to offer help.



Today’s second class was called ‘Opening Minds’, which was quite interesting and very different from classes that I know of at secondary school in the Netherlands. The idea of Opening Minds is that pupils work independently on a subject. They are asked to gather information from a variety of sources, such as the books, sheets and the Internet. After having found lots of information, each of the pupils makes notes to form sentences on their own afterwards, and put it in either a book or a leaflet that they have to fix themselves as well. The pupils seemed to be very enthusiastic about this way of working. There was a lot of cutting and colouring going on and each of the pupils worked very creatively on their books.
One of the main aims of Opening Minds is that pupils think about how they should go to work and that they decide themselves what has yet to happen. It was a very interesting class to be compared with a class later that day called ‘Enquiring Minds’.



PSE was another very interesting class. PSE is focused on discussing political issues such as smoking, (underage) sex, teenagers drinking alcohol and other subjects. The teacher introduced smoking issues by giving examples, such as that being an adolescent you will be most likely introduced to smoking by peer pressure.
The idea of PSE is that pupils come up with opinions based on facts and figures, which are to be found on the Internet. While a small group of pupils are asked to find some facts on this issue, the other pupils start thinking about their ideas of smoking as a teenager and hold a discussion. Since the UK will be ‘free’ of smoking by 1 July, there were many reasons to talk about this openly in class. I very much liked PSE as I was also involved in the discussion. When the pupils had found out that I was Dutch, they started asking questions about how liberal the Netherlands are towards smoking, alcohol, drugs and even homosexuality.

Today’s last class would be Enquiring Minds. Every pupil has his or her own laptop to work on. The idea of this class is that each pupil works independently on a blog, on which they give information about a subject they like. This class started by the pupils being taught how to design a website properly, as there were set some rules for the pupils to follow.
In my opinion, Enquiring Minds works fine, as each pupil likes to have their favourite subject read by visitors of their blog. They put a lot of effort in their blogs not only by giving information on their subject, but also add pictures and links so that a lot of people keep visiting their blog. The element which makes this course really interesting is that every pupil is asked to reflect on each weeks’ progress, what it is that seems to be working fine and what not, so that they know what things should be avoided during the coming weeks.



As you might understand, I enjoyed my day at Ashton Park School very much, for giving me a good idea of what secondary education can be like at a secondary school in Bristol.

Adventures in Montpelier

Yesterday Johnny asked me to go with him to a huge, old building not far from our home in Montpelier. His plans were to take a few pictures of the walls inside the building as there is saying that it will be going to the ground in a few weeks. Johnny told me that he had been coming there for years and he was sure nobody lived there.

We had to enter the building by climbing over a lousy wall and some barbed wire put over it. After having made quite a huge leap we found ourselves in the garden (I don’t know whether or not garden is a suitable word for it as the grass almost reached my waist) and to our amazement there was someone strolling there. The guy (who must have been on every drug available in Bristol – he was absolutely NOT on the same planet we are on) with eyes as huge as cow balls stood still and asked in an not to be identifiable accent what our idea was of coming there. We told them that our plan was to take a few pictures of the graffiti on the walls in the building but he absolutely did not get any sense of it. However, we decided to find our way up to the building. After having mounted another wall and having spotted some rats chasing something we encountered a squatter who apparently did not agree us trespassing his (?) home. He compared our being there to him bulldozing our granny’s garden and Johnny explained to him that he had be coming there for years taking pictures and that he had never seen anybody on this area. He kept saying that this area was his and that it wasn’t that long ago that another guy had broken is back by falling out of one of the windows after having had a few beers. We decided not to enter the building (it was only him at that moment but who’d know how many of them he would gather in a few minutes) and we shook hands. On our way back we encountered the first doglike man again who was not in a state of having a conversation with.

Johnny and I went to a park afterwards and we had a chat with some friends of his. It’s a shame that I didn’t bring my camera – Johnny did, although he wasn’t capable to take any pictures - but I reckon this adventure was worth telling anyway.

My first day in Bristol

There we are, broadcasting live from Bristol.
It was a short and pleasant flight from Amsterdam Schiphol to Bristol International Airport yesterday. Once I managed to have my suitcase and a taxi cab arranged (indeed a Ford Galaxy!) there was nothing left to do then to continue my way to Upper Cheltenham Place in Montpelier, Bristol.

Nen (the woman whom I am staying with) invited me with open arms and showed me my room directly. After having unpacked my suitcase and my bag, Nen invited me to have a cup of tea in the living room. Black tea, as I don't take sugar nor milk in it. The house is beautiful and very English. I decided not to sleep late as my plan for the next day was to get up early and to take the time admiring my surroundings.

My room, tidy as it looks

Some of the surroundings which I am able to see from my room

We (Nen and her little son - Stan) went to the shop this morning to buy some bread, milk and eggs. After having done some running exercises with Stan and his mates I set out to explore Bristol by bike.

As I hadn't been cycling for ages and since Bristol is quite hilly, it was a real challenge to get to the City Centre. Eventually I managed, parked my bicycle and found my way through the City Centre.

I paid a visit to Marks & Spencer of course; the milk was quite good

A good example of what Bristol is like these days; there is a lot of building going on, next to its authentic buildings. Picture taken in Park Street

I even spotted Little Britain's Vicky Pollard on top of 'the Griffin'

I decided to watch the FA Cup Finals between Chelsea and Manchester later the day (Drogba is an absolute nightmare scoring a goal very late during extra time) but my day has been fine anyway.

My first day in Bristol

Very soon now ...

I will be in Bristol very soon now. This Friday will be the day of my arrival. If everything's going well, I will be brought to Montpelier by a Ford Galaxy (Checker Cars) around 11PM. Then I will meet the people with whom I will be staying as well. Starting Saturday morning with unpacking my bags, the plan for my first day is to spend the day bicyling in Bristol and make myself familiar with the near surroundings, the city of Bristol and perhaps to have some traditional English breakfast.
Awesome!