Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Sorry for not posting a dance article on Saturday. I was ill with a bad bug on Friday evening and I wanted to rest instead of finishing up a blog post but I'm back now. Today, I'm going to be talking about a few of the places that I would like to go to at some point in the distant future. It's nice to have something to work towards and there are definitely a few countries that I've been having my eye on recently so I'm going to share them with you today. Enjoy! I think the first place that I would really like to go to is Japan. As I'm taking standard level Japanese at school, I may have the opportunity to do this with my school but taking into consideration the current climate we're all in, I know that if that doesn't happen, I can always go myself. I actually have some relatives in Japan and so I thought it would be nice at some point to rekindle that side of my family and visit a truly amazing coun...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, There is no doubt that there's been talk of a second wave of Covid-19 and not only is it just another wave but it could potentially be a wave bigger than the first, like what's already happened in many other countries like France. That puts a lot of uncertainty on us. What can we depend on? What is our trajectory in all this uncertainty? I wanted to write a post on this because I think there's an important life lesson to be learnt here. We often talk of plans and aims for the future which is a brilliant thing. We did it at the start of this year because we were all pumped up for a fresh start to this new and exciting decade. It was a time to make changes and improvements that would better us as individuals so that we could achieve our future goals. I did this and I'll probably always do this because I like the sound of the future and I like what the world looks in my head, even if it's not a reality just yet. Dr...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Recently, my dad finished building the pizza oven that he'd been working on for months and last week, he was able to lift it up onto the metal table he had built. The fact that he had managed to work on the pizza oven and lift it up on his own, amazes me. If you don't know how heavy a pizza oven is then I should probably break down to you how it's made. You get a metal case, in this situation an old metal oil barrel, and you cut it down to shape and then you fill it with concrete/clay so that there's a thick layer to line the inside. Once this is dry, it is pretty rock solid and weighs a tonne and that's the sort of structure my dad had to lift on the table. It was so heavy that he had to ditch the old wooden table he bought to hold it up and he had to weld a whole new metal table. My dad's a physicist so he was able to engineer a way of lifting this bomb-like oven mostly by himself. My mum was not completel...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about my experiences so far, studying IB dance. If you don't know about the IB qualification in general, it is quite simply a 6 subject course that is designed to broaden your knowledge of the world around you. Although it doesn't go as into depth as the normal A-level, it does get you to look at other fields of work, other than the things you know and are good at and for me, I really like this because it gives you knowledge outside the classroom environment as well. I'm taking English Lang/Lit, Maths Applications and Interpretations, Nature of Science, History, Japanese, and of course Dance. The subjects I'm taking at higher level are dance, English, and history and the other 3 subjects are all at standard level but today, I'm going to be talking about dance. I hope you find this interesting!  I think the IB dance course is very much a contemporary-based course t...

  Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I was searching up popular debate topics on the internet since so many of you really enjoyed my last debate post about should make-up be allowed in school? You can read that here if you haven't done so already. However, on my hunt for another debate topic, I found another brilliant one and it is, is homeschooling better than traditional schooling? Now, I've always been a firm believer in the statement that school is based entirely on what you choose to make of it and I think that this has got a lot to do with this question. I know one of my old friends went to this school in the area that had a pretty bad reputation, or so everyone said, and despite that, she was always top of the class when she moved to my school and she was always a diligent student. I know also that apparently, one of my dad's colleagues went to study at Eaton and still managed to fail all of his GCSEs. Although I've heard some stories about ...

  Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I think that when the end of this year comes (a) everyone will be extremely happy and (b) I'm sure we'll all realise what a year of pure change 2020 has been. There was the refreshing feeling excitement at the beginning of the year when everyone was ready to make a change in the new decade but obviously, we were all thrown off guard a lot by the pandemic that put a stop to a lot of our resolutions and because we had all grown complacent, we were pretty taken aback by everything that happened. We were not used to change and everything felt out of place for us.  Now, it's a pretty similar feeling. We are able to go back to school and work and regain some of what we lost during lockdown but we're still having to live the cliché "new normal" and it doesn't feel the same. I really like my new school and I think that it has a lot of great values but after sitting through 6 months of no school, it certainl...

  Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Following on from the post I did last week, I thought it would be a great idea to review my favourite dances not from The Next Step but actually from The Royal Ballet. I don't do ballet but I must say that if I were to stumble across the Royal Opera House YouTube channel, I would be sitting there for a long time, watching all the videos they do on the Royal Ballet. There are so many amazing videos that they do of performances and rehearsals and I just find it really interesting to watch. Here are some of my favourite dances from The Royal Ballet! My first favourite dance has got to be Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. I like this dance because it's technical and involves a lot of ballet repertoire but the production also involves a lot of theatrical characterisation. When the Mad Hatter dances his tap solo, it isn't just about tap dancing but about being alluring and quirky through the sound of his tap dancing. Wh...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Recently, I watched a video made by the YouTuber, Niomi Smart, on how she felt the internet has changed over the years. If you don't know the background of Niomi Smart, then she is basically a well-known and well-established YouTuber, who has been making videos about healthy eating, veganism, charity work, and ethical living for around 8 or 9 years now. She graduated from university with a law degree but she initially started a blog to voice her thoughts on fashion and to share her popular lifestyle content with her viewers and she then grew into a successful internet sensation. She was a part of the labelled "Brit Crew" group along with Zoe Sugg, Alfie Deyes, Joe Sugg, Tanya Burr, Jim Chapman, Louise Pentland, and Marcus Butler. She also released her book, Eat Smart, in 2016 and continues to co-run her healthy food box, Sourced Box, with Marcus Butler. With over 1.5 million subscribers on her channel, she continues t...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, On Thursday, I had my first day of school at my sixth form college. I was quite nervous because I didn't know what to expect and it was going to be a new environment for me to be in. This was especially enhanced by the 6 month lockdown period that meant I couldn't go to proper school for the whole time and so stepping into a new building and embracing a new way of life was definitely difficult for me. Although I knew I was finished, I felt like I still needed to go back to secondary school because I never really had time to say goodbye properly or formulate that I wasn't going to study at secondary school anymore.  However, bravely, I woke up on Thursday, had my breakfast, got ready, and got in the car with my dad to go to college. I arrived at 10:00am and signed my name on the register before putting on my mask, sanitising my hands, and going into the hall for assembly. Since we weren't allowed to change and since ...

  Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, As I'm sure many of you already know, I'm a big fan of The Next Step. If you don't know what The Next Step is, it's basically a reality-style TV drama about a group of dancers at The Next Step Dance Studio. Although there's a nervous atmosphere around the arrival of the regionals, nationals, internationals, and even Dancemania, competitions, the real drama happens outside of dance with relationships, breakups, arguments, cliques, and betrayal happening all at once. I've been watching this show since I was 9 and the first episode I watched was whilst I was on holiday in the Peak District, 7 years ago. I wrote about Briar Nolet and Myles Erlick before in my All about series and I'm going to feature some of their dances here but now that there are 7 incredible series of The Next Step, there are so many more amazing dances to talk about. Let's have a look at some of my favourites. My favourite dance fr...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Today, I'll be talking about a beautiful video that was made for the channel, Liberty in North Korea.  Liberty in North Korea is a worldwide movement that works alongside the people of North Korea, to aid them in reaching freedom safely. They aim to do this by protecting defectors hiding in China, helping to rescue  refugees through a modern-day underground railroad through Southeast Asia, and raising a deeper understanding of North Korea with ordinary people across the world. Since North Korea has been a fairly closed country for about 70 years, due to the Kim dynasty and the reign of Kim Jong-un, many refugees have not seen their family for years as they've become completely isolated from them. They can't call, text, or visit them, and due to the harsh communist regime of North Korea, many hardly know if they're loved ones are still alive. Liberty in North Korea innovatively set out to change that. I've seen a...