Keeping Up With Juliette

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Friday the 16th of September 2022, for me, was definitely a day to remember because it was on this day that me and my parents went to visit the Cambridge colleges for the first time. How strange it all felt indeed, on so many levels. I have been living in Cambridge now for 16 years. I have quite literally grown up in a university city  and yet, regardless of how much I have recently spoken about these colleges on my tours, I had never actually been inside any of the colleges I talked about until that day and what a wonderful experience it was. To me, anyone who has genuinely worked hard in their life to even become a candidate for such an institution, deserves all the praise they can get. Oxford and Cambridge are steeped in tradition; they will always have their students who have had these universities planned as their end destination since they were very young. But hidden amongst them, there are those have spent many hours wor...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Recently, me, my mum, and my sister Alice have all been sitting down every Saturday night to watch the latest episodes of Strictly Come Dancing 2022. It has been a long-standing tradition of ours since me and Alice were very young, to watch a bit of Strictly and for many years it has brought us a lot of joy to watch our favourite celebrities transform themselves from complete novices to experienced dancers. However, more recently, I guess we haven't been enjoying the series as much as we used to. It feels a bit of a shame for me to say this because I know how much Strictly Come Dancing has provided a platform for Ballroom and Latin dancing to become more widely recognised by the general public and I do believe that it is actually because of the show that these dance styles have become less associated with the older generation and now highly loved by the youth. This was a subject that I actually explored in more detail in my IB...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  I had dreams of learning how to drive last year when I turned 17 and although I had attempted to get my provisional license at the time, I found that I was quite busy doing the IB and so I didn't actually do any lessons. However, as I am now on a gap year and my schedule is no longer as hectic as it once was, I have now begun my driving lessons with my dad and my instructor. At first, after I was able to obtain my provisional, I was just going up and down the industrial estate with my dad, getting used to the general mechanics of the car. Then, towards the end of summer, I got myself a driving instructor and I have recently been doing some lessons with him. At first, I was a little bit hesitant to get booked on with this particular driving instructor because he used to teach my older sister Alice how to drive, and at one point, towards her driving test and in a moment of stress, he did snap at her quite harshly. I have also he...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  As I am sure many of you are probably already aware, if you've been following my Instagram and my blog for the past few months, recently I have been working as a river tour guide with Scudamore's Punting Company in Cambridge. In May, I trained with the company where I learnt how to punt, deliver my tour, and sell tickets to customers out on the street and in June, I took my river tour guide exam, which enabled me to get onto the job. If you want to hear a detailed account of that experience, then you can you can read my blog posts here ( River Tour Guide Training & River Tour Guide Exam ). However, as I'm sure you've read, I found the whole training experience to be quite difficult at first and I definitely made a lot of mistakes along the way (like accidentally hitting a customer in the face for one!). But, in a way, I was glad that I challenged myself because I notice now, just a few months later, that I...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post,  Last week on Tuesday, I went to an audition for Cambridge Youth Dance Company at Impington Village College. A few months ago now, before the summer, I went to the taster session for Cambridge Youth Dance Company so that I could get a better understanding of what the company sessions were going to be like. You can read all about my experience here if you missed the post. If you don't know about CYDC, it's a small company run by Kate Durrant that holds contemporary dance classes, guest workshops, and theatre trips for all of its members. In the that post I put up before the summer, I wrote about how I wasn't sure if I was going to do the audition or not because at the time, I wasn't sure if the company was for me. However, since then I began to think that I should give it a go anyway because it might be a good opportunity for me to perform in different places and get some good mentoring along the way. Plus, Kate kin...

Hello everybody and welcome back to another blog post, Apologies for my absence on here recently. A lot of things have been happening. As I write this post, I am actually back from Spain and I am back to the normal working routine at Scudamore's. So far, despite the fact that we're now off the peak season and heading into the autumn, I am enjoying the working life and being a river tour guide. I feel as though I am growing and developing as a person everyday which is a nice feeling and I find that it's such a refreshing change from the hectic schedule I had during the IB. However, if you follow me on my Instagram, you'll also know that I recently visited the Cambridge colleges with my parents and currently I am making applications to the University of Cambridge to study history. To be perfectly honest, I doubt I am actually going to get in because it seems as though the application process is very demanding and only a select few make it through all the stages. But, taki...