Welcome home.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!! Long flight on Christmas Eve but I made it back to SA on Christmas day. I arrived all proudly South African wearing my rugby jersey. I recieved a warm welcome from the family and as you can see I was greeted with a welcome home ballon at the airport and a banner at home.

It was great to see that nothing had changed since I left - the Christmas decorations were even still there. Heeheehee. Okay maybe they were not still up but instead had been put back up.

Thought I would include pics of the fam all opening pressies and getting spoiled. It was great to be home again. Will take some time to get used to the heat though.

Last day St Martins

St Martins in the Fields High School for Girls has helped improve my opinion of British children. I have included some pics of my classes. Unfortunately didn't get an opportunity to get pics of all of them. They are really sweet kids.

My Year 11 form class; like a register class but I was a co-tutor so I was not always with them. Occasionally had to fill in for other Year 11 form tutors, I really missed them on these occassions.



This is Mrs Addo she was the official tutor for the class.

You can tell that they are all model wannabes cos there are SOOOOO many pics of them they kept on bugging me to take more photos.

Year 7 AR - lovely children.
Year 8 EH - really talkative but good kids.
Year 7 KOR - again just lovely.

All photos that follow are still 7 KOR. I think in general the year 7s were better behaved kinda like Grade 8's in SA. I must say it was not the same at Eastbrook - the Year 7's were the worst of the bunch.

York

I had a late night last night but was still up early for my trip to York. Thalia and I managed to win some tickets with Anderson Tours but unfortunately she couldn't join me. The tour group started at Kings Cross Train station so after letting tour guide know that I had arrived I made my way to platforms 9 and 10 to try find platform 93/4. I managed to find it and had to stop some poor stranger to take a pic of me pushing a luggage troly through the wall. Unfortunately I had other appointments so could not catch the train to Hogwarts.

On the way to York I all of a sudden realised that I was heading north, and quite far north too - didn't bring an extra jersey to go under my coat. We arrived in York and it was cold - but bearable.

When I say bearable it means a short walk outside would be fine as long as you are on your way to a nice and warm spot somewhere. This was not the case - in fact we had a 2 hour walking tour to start the day - all of which was outside. As I said earlier I had a late night and didn't manage to get sleep on the train so in all honsty I can't remember much of the history of York. All I really remember is that the Romans used to live there.


Let me try, we were shown the smallest window in York - on the right. I also discovered that the people of York were quite morbid. There is a street in York where they try to name all the pubs in such a way that they all have the theme of hangings. I took a pic of The Three Legged Mare which is the name of the three legged structure people were hanged on.

During the tour we also went to the ruins of a Cathedral, they apparently used to have stage plays in front of it but that is now considered a risk to health and safety.

The other photo's below are just to depict the Christmas spirit and to show how scary wobbly some of the buildings look. The one building you can see the centre horizontal support is all warped and the other one you can see how in two little houses the top floors stick out right into the middle.

Another one of the very few facts I remember is the birth place of Guy Fawkes. Strangely he was not born in his own house, his mom was visiting a friend when she went into labour.

After the tour I was frozen but still manged to make my way through the markets and went to see the only tower that remains from the York Castle. There was an outdoor ice rink in the parking lot so I took a pic from the tower.