The official start of the WisWex!

Dear all,

Today I woke up in Centerparcs, packed my stuff and hopped on the train at Ely station.
The only day the English weather decides to be good, I am stuck on a train to Manchester for 3.5 hours!
Near the end of the ride the train got so hot it was probably possible to successfully cultivate tropical plants inside it. When I arrived in Manchester I was met by Dirk, who dropped my off at my hotel.
Then I met Sonja, Warren and Kitty in the lobby of the Copthorne Hotel.

Here we had a little meeting, during which I was officially named "staff" of the Lego show. We also spoke about all the jobs that still need doing in the days leading up to the event and on the event itself.
Furthermore we discussed all the exclusive previews of new sets during the show, for anybody who hasn't bought tickets yet, these previews are definately worth it!
Next we visited the Trafford centre and Event City. I have never visited Manchester before,
I was amazed at the huge neoclassical bombastic building that is the Trafford centre. Next we enjoyed all lovely meal, while watching a huge television screen and waiting for our The Lego Show commercial to show on it. For anybody who hasn't seen it you should look at it on Youtube: http://www.thelegoshow.com/our-tv-ads. The commercial is rather funny and contains a rather pointless bit of stop-motion-animation including a steak shooting out of someones head....

Elveden Forrest

Dear all,

Yesterday I woke up early on a boat, I was woken by a loud "don't worry be happy" on the intercom.
The effect of this was that this song was stuck in the head of every individual passenger (over one thousand!) on the boat, which resulted in a whisthling concert. Then we drove to the centerparcs village located in the elveden forrest. While we were waling throug the parc we directly noticed an unusually large number of squirrels, especially arround the litter bins. Below I added a picture of one of these squirrels, not that this photo serves any particulair purpose, it's just that squirreles are incredibly cute, especially when being fed by me. When
we arrived at the little cottage, I did the same thing everybody does: look in all the cupboards.
I was amazed when I found sitting in one of these cupboards a packet of chocolate sprinkels (hagelslag).

Unfortunatly this amazement did not last, when it turned out my dad had already started unpacking our stuff. Furthermore I also found out, that althoug the dutch political party CDA may not be populair with the dutch people, they are succesfull on a whole different level. For all the electrial apliences in our cottage had apparently been produced by them (see picture below). Later that evening we met up with my old exhange family and we had a lovley dinner with them.

However I have probably had one of weirdest toilet experiences in my life. It started when the restaurant had decided to advertise food on the toilet door, which I thik is a little weird but also convenient in a way. " As soon as you are empty you can start thinking about your next fill up" . Then when I opened the toilet door I was greeted by a loud noise, as if an airplane engine had just started right next to me, which scared my socks of! Several seconds later I found out that I had accidentally started one the blowdriers. After enjoying this lovley meal we went home and went to bed.

When I woke up today I looked out of the window and found a small deer-like creature was foraging close to our cottage. I will post a pictre below, if anybody knows the exact name of this creature please leave a comment. Right now I am sitting on the village square utilising the free WiFi and waiting for my old exchange family to arrive. When the do we are all going to enjoy a swim in the gigantious tropical-poolcomplex on the parc....


*update I have posted the pictures, the deer turned out to be muntjack-deer

The journey begins

Dear all,

Today started early, when I left school together with an coach filled with first graders (avec mon petit frere), which I was supposed to supervise during their school trip to Blijdorp zoo in Rotterdam. When the students had all set off to complete their assignments about all the different zoo animals, the supervisors decided to enjoy a cup of coffee/tea. Luckily when some of the supervisors that did not posses any background in the biological sciences, tried to crush the small black ants that had started to walk over the table, this was prevented by the biologists. This made a couple of small worker-ants extremely happy. When the caffiene had hit everybody's system the supervisors set of to explore the zoo and ,when necesarry, help the students with their assignments. First we all enjoyed watching a young polarbear try to eat people under water, unfortunatly for this polarbear there was thick layer of glass preventing him from doing so. This once again established the fact that polarbears do not seem to posses complex reasoning and observational abilities. While walking through the zoo we were hit by an extremely nasty odor, originating from a rather teritorial maned wolf. Next we were informed by a little sign that this smell had actually been the cause of a search warrant being issued by the police to look signs of hemp cultivation, however as stated before this smell was originating from the maned wolf.
When all the first graders left the zoo, I set out to the Hook of Holland where I boarded the rather big, or to be more precise huge, or to be more precise gigantious Stena Britannica, the ferry on which I currently reside. The ship has just started to sail to Harwich and will arrive there at 5:30 (Greenwich time zone) tomorrow morning. I will thus have to sleep on the ship, there is just one question remaining, why dear National Geograpic magazine did you just publish a magnificient issue of your marvelous magzine containing a feature article on the Titanic disaster....

Introduction

Dear all,

This most magnificient (if I may say so) page you are on is my blog for the
WISWEX project, for which I will be volunteering at The Lego Show/AFOLCON in Manchester.
On this blog I will post updates every day during my WISWEX, I sincerely hope you and my future me  will all enjoy reading about my endeavours that are yet to come...