the tourists

We took the day off a while ago to go do some of the "touristy" things around London. Tamara has of course done all of it before, but we had to do it again. We took one of the open bus tours, which included a bus trip and a river cruise from the London Eye to Tower Bridge. It was all quite interesting and now I've seen all that I needed to see. We gave the London Eye a skip, for financial reasons and the fact that there was about a million people in the que.
The photo is us at Princess Di's memorial fountain.

photos around town

This is Putney Bridge on the Thames. I took this photo on the way back from a local pub. I used the long shutter and the photo came out ok, complete with four swans.

This little Smart Car is covered in astro turf. It belongs to a company called Easigrass...guess what they specialize in? We see this little car driving around every once in a while, but came across it parked in Putney. We took the photo with Tami's mobile.

These Mini's are from the London Mini Centre.
They restore old Mini's to look like these, just like the ones from Italian Job. They look pretty cool, but carry a price tag from £6500 - £8500. Crazy!

bodiam castle

I left Tamara alone at home for the weekend, so she decided to do some sightseeing of her own. Good friends Duncan and Ret took Tami into the English countryside. They visited this medieval moated castle known as Bodiam Castle.

Bodiam castle is a moated, curtain-walled castle which was built in 1385 to either reiterate the status & wealth of this ambitious knight of the realm or, as protection against French raids. It was dismantled in 1643. There is a ton of history attached to this castle, but I'm not going to go into it.

The photos Tami took here were, amazingly enough, taken with her cellphone, a Nokia 6300. We were both astonished at the quality of these photos.

If you feel like finding out more about this castle...www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-bodiamcastle.htm

3 peaks challenge with bmf and tenovus

This past weekend I worked for a fitness and events company called British Military Fitness. Go check out there website: www.britmilfit.com and see what they're all about. BMF was managing the safety for a charity event organised by Tenovus, www.tenovus.com, for cancer patients and research. This event is called the 3 Peaks challenge and comprises doing 3 of the highest peaks in the UK in 24 hours.
It was the highest peaks in Wales, Snowdon mountain, in England, Scafell Pike, and in Scotland, Ben Nevis. The object was to climb all three peaks, including transport between the peaks, in 24 hours. It's quite a mean challenge, but I'm thinking about trying to take part myself.
My role in all of this was merely as a driver. The best thing about this was that in one weekend I got to see the Wales, England and Scottish countrysides. First we went to Llanberis in Wales, a small town situated in the Snowdonia mountains. Here competitors climbed Snowdon, the easiest walk of the three on Saturday morning. Then the competitors where off to Scafell Pike in the Lake Districts of England. Unfortunately I did not get to go here because I had to take the long drive up to the Scottish Highlands and a small town called Fort William to go to Ben Nevis. The drive itself was fun, mainly because I got to drive the latest Range Rover with all the extras like DVD, Satellite Guidance, TV, etc. This vehicle is an absolute pleasure to drive and made the 10 hours back to London feel a little shorter.
Unfortunately we always seemed to be in a rush, so stopping to take photos was out of the question. All the photos I took was literally taken in the drive out of the window.
I posted some photos here of Wales and Scotland, not great I know, but it's all I could do!

scotland

wales

teaching in the uk

When your agent phones and says, "Look, this school isn't one of our best, so it's going to be a hard day at the office," you must know......
Today I had my first UK teaching experience, and let me tell you, all those horror stories you here people tell, well, they're probably all true! It was an unbelievable day and the blatant disrespect for authority was almost scary - 14 year olds telling you to F#$%-off.
Classroom handouts are nothing more than paper planes, balls to aim towards the bin or someones head, or, if you lucky, to turn over and draw pictures on the back.
All in all a good day. At the end of the day I must just the British Pound to SA Rand conversion, and it might just seem worth it!

forgotten graves

We find this spooky scene, straight out of a horror movie, whilst geocaching. Some of the tombstones dated back to the middle 1800's, but we also saw some graves from the 1940's.

Something also rings a bell with movie called "Midnight in the garden of good and evil".

Some of the tombs have been moved....reminding me of

about 150 episodes of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer".

You can't help but wonder how this cemetry was "forgotten," but surely there must be people out there that still has some relatives in here.

cool links

I've been cruising around on YOUTUBE quite a bit and found some cool links. Go check out these videos:
Quiksilver Dynamite surfing.....should set up a voting pole to vote whether this is true or not.
Quiksilver:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xfBNxNds0Q
Here's one of a group of kayakers showing the world why it's not a good idea to run a weir.
Kayak Beat Down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xE5N52V3IRk

geocaching

Our hobby of geocahcing was not left in South Africa. We thought it would be a nice thing to do becasue alot of caches take you places of interest, normally places you wouldn't visit on your own. We have only found a couple so far, but will go on cache hunts as often as we can.
Those of you don'tknow what geocaching is all about, check the website www.geocaching.com, it's really cool, better than sitting around doing nothing!

intro

left: Putney Bridge, Public Transport, Low tide in the Thames, Full moon.

Tamara and I arrived on the "Mud Island" at 7am on the last last weekend of the month of May. Listening to all the well travelled individuals in our family saying, "Don't pack warm clothes, it's going to be hot there. You can buy warm stuff while your there".....well, they were wrong! It was the coldest couple of days i've had in a while. Quoting a newspaper headline, they recieved a months worth of rainfall in 24 hours.
The first week was spent cruising around familiarizing ourselves to the big L with it's shiny red busses, East European slaves and the tubes.
Out of pure boredom i've decided to write this blog, not to keep everybody informed, but to give me something to do every once in a while!
Also I'll try to post some photo's every once in a while. All photos will be taken with Tamara's Canon Ixus, a nice little "mik-en-druk" camera which takes awesome photos.