Chris Worfolk's Blog

Another short drive away was Verona though perhaps not an easy drive – while most of Europe seems pretty sensible on the road, the Italians are very different. Things like coaches overtaking on bends, randomly pulling out and best of all, not being able to get into the other lane so simply pulling out and driving head on down your lane until someone lets them in were common place.

Luckily we eventually made it to Verona alive and found our hotel which was just off the main square and best of all – had a McDonald’s on the ground floor!

Once settled in to what was a nice hotel albeit it not offering wifi in our rooms and even in the lobby at a reasonably heavy price we decided to go for a wander and explore the city.

It was very nice – the pavements looked new and well maintained and all the shops were beautiful – it was basically an entire city which looked like the Victoria Quarter in Leeds. Of course, we couldn’t afford to shop in any of them.

We ended up on a square where we decided to have dinner paying what I think was a record of €7 for a beer and being served by a crazy waiter who when I asked for a white wine soon reappeared with a glass of red insisting I would prefer this one. Mental.

Still the food was very nice and on the way home we stopped by Juliet’s balcony, which was unfortunately closed. It’s also a bit of a joke, it’s not even made of the same colour stone as the rest of the building, it’s not even like they have pretended it was originally there – not that you really can for a fictional character.

We hit the road early on Monday morning to take the road through the Alps to Venice. It was a long drive and continued the dramatic scenery as the road twisted and turned it’s way through the Alpine hills.

We eventually arrived at Venice late afternoon and parked up in the multistory at the edge of the city which was so big it was almost a small town in itself. We then jumped on the water bus to head down the Grand Canal to the other side of the city where our hotel was.

Venice is a crazy place – I mean who thought it would be a good idea to build a city in the middle of the sea? It’s so strange that you are walking around on all these huge squares and buildings, all of which are just floating on the water (they’re not actually floating, but still).

They did however have an annoying habit of mixing up languages – there were loads of t-shirts saying “I love Venezia” which is just annoying – Venezia is the Italian spelling of Venice, so it should either be “I love Venice” or “Lo amo Venezia”, mixing it up is just silly!

The night life was great in Venice also – the tiny winding streets were packed with people (and I’m sure could have felt packed with hardly anyone in them). It seemed to be the kind of place where you could live for a year and still not really know how the streets connect together.

We had pizza for dinner at a small restaurant then headed onto Piazza St Marco to watch the bands that were playing at the restaurants we couldn’t afford to eat at.

Our hotel was traditional Venesian place, which means authentic but otherwise rubbish, and filled with mosquitoes which decided to try and eat me alive.

The next day we decided to walk back across the city towards the car which was quite a distance with all the stuff but did allow us to see much more of Venice.

It was an odd mix of churches, tourist shops containing weird masquerade ball masks and actual shops to serve the people that actually live there.

Having had some long and tiring days on the road it was nice to have what by then seemed a mere two hours on the road to make it to Salzburg, Austria.

We checked into the guest house and headed to the Old Town which at first seemed somewhat of a ghost town – it was only until we had spent 15 minutes wandering around that we found the corner that actually had something open.

The buildings were incredibly beautiful however and it continued Germany’s tradition of being very clean, something which is really noticeably missing from the UK and indeed The Netherlands and Italy.

The views surrounding Salzburg were equally as spectacular – nestled in the foothills of the Alps there were dramatic mountains surrounding the city and indeed the connection to the old town from the new town was a passageway carved through the mountain in something resembling Lord of the Rings.

Leaving Luxembourg we began the drive over to Munich. We were planning to drive through the Black Forest but being under time constraints we didn’t actually get to see much of it. It actually reminded me of the National Forest just south of Sheffield – not a lot of trees but plenty of farmland.

We arrived in Munich to find that the hotel didn’t actually have twin rooms – only double rooms. This made for a rather intimate night (by intimate night I mean rough animal sex – but what happens in Munich, stays in Munich).

We headed into town to find the Hofbrauhaus, a legendary drinking establishment in the heart of Munich. They served giant beers and had a band plus the food was pretty good and the gift shop was open until late into the night allowing Kieran to buy a stein.

Interestingly, Germany really look down on jaywalking – and there is just something weird about watching drunk people patently wait for the light at a crossing that you just can’t imagine in the UK.

It’s just a shame we were a week too early for Oktoberfest.

Still, that is really just an excuse to come back at some point.

We headed out from Amsterdam and down the motorway as far as Belgium before taking off to smaller roads to drive through one of the national parks. There was of course a quick stop off to buy some Belgian chocolate too!

Heading through southern Beligum and into Luxembourg was a fantastic drive as we headed up into the hills and the rolling countryside opened up.

We eventually made it to Luxembourg city shortly before talk and checked into the Mecure hotel which was of excellent standard – once of the nicest we stayed in despite it only being £50 per night for a twin room! As far as we could tell everyone comes to Luxembourg in business during the week and the weekends are just dead.

We headed for a wander round to take some photos of scary trees once we checked in and eventually found ourselves eating at a rather upmarket Chinese restaurant which produced some reasonably nice food.

Breakfast at the hotel was very nice too – there is just something awesome about eating chicken for breakfast. And with hindsight the €5 we paid for a pint of beer the night before was actually pretty reasonable given what we would later pay.

As some of you know, myself and a few friends recently hit the road for a bit of a trip across Europe. I didn’t want to blog during it because I wanted to actually enjoy it, or at very least spend the time trying to de-stress from all the traveling. But now I’m sat in a villa in France with a recently liberated internet connection, I thought I would write a bit up about our adventures.

We took the ferry over from Hull to Rotterdam which was a nightmare – I didn’t manage to sleep the whole night and there is just something depressing about being sat in a bar, which isn’t open, by yourself at 5am in the morning. Still I managed to come away from the casino £1 up so all is good.

Having arrived we headed up to Amsterdam for our first night. Amsterdam is a fairly boring place in the day – it’s basically London, it’s dirty, there is lots of litter, everyone speaks some degree of English and it’s full of traffic.

However by night Amsterdam really comes alive. The Red Light District was amazing, I don’t have any photos of it as I didn’t fancy taking my camera round there at night for fear of it getting swiped but it looks pretty much like this picture someone called Laura took.

The cafes were great as well. Not only can you just go in there and order a joint but they also have interesting quirks such as the cat sat on the bar that we found – with a notice saying “please don’t give our cat cannabis – it already get’s stoned enough!”

Another real bonus of Amsterdam is that it was the only place in Europe in which we saw a KFC!

They also seem to love Argentinian steak houses of which there seemed to be hundreds. As a consequence we decided to give one of them a try – it was no River Plate but it was very nice none the less. As was the little cafe we found for breakfast the next day.

A big thank you to everyone who joined us in Leeds this weekend to make Sunrise Conference 2010 a huge success! Throughout the weekend we had an array of talks, seminars, workshops and discussions on a variety of topics – everything from leadership and organisation to marketing, the meaning of life and transhumanism! You can see photos from the event on our Facebook page and the conference website for full details.

On Friday we were down at the University of Leeds 2010 staff fair to promote the Humanist Chaplaincy at the university.

As you probably know, atheists are currently celebrating Stephen Hawking announcing there is officially no god.

I was on BBC Radio Leeds talking about it earlier. It went pretty badly, to be honest, I could have spoken a lot better and we ended up discussing what evidence I would require to believe in god rather than talking about Hawking’s new book. Never the less it’s always an experience and it’s great to get a mixture of view points on the show which BBC Leeds are always really good at.

You can listen again for seven days on the BBC website, it’s about 38 minutes in.

Another year of record exam results is upon us, and of course, they’ve got easier again.

While this is often refuted by the industry, here are two reasons why exams arguably genuinely are getting easier every year.

1. Teaching standards get better and the exams do not get proportionally harder as a result.

The argument against this is that just because teaching standards are getting better doesn’t mean that the exams should get harder as well. After all, if you can teach a child more stuff in a shorter period of time, that actually means they do actually know more and thus deserve a higher grade than the generation before.

However, to add to this discussion, there isn’t a great deal of evidence that younger generations are actually significantly smarter than previous ones. Teaching standards are getting better, but not necessarily at teaching children useful information, rather they are getting better at teaching kids to do well in exams.

If there was huge leaps of improvement in teaching techniques to make children smarter, surely we would all expect to be significantly smarter than our parents and I don’t think this is the case.

2. The exam board make conscious decision to award higher grades each year.

It’s all very well saying more children reached A grade standard this year, every year, but this is actually a long way from the way that universities work.

At degree level, everyone sits the same paper, they are all marked and then they work out how easy or how hard the paper was and move the grade boundaries according – so if everyone got really high marks they will up the grade boundaries to reduce the amount of people that did well and if everyone did really badly they reduce the grade boundaries to increase the amount of people that passed.

This prevents one year who get a really hard paper being unfairly punished against a year later which may get a much easier paper. This is a system which has been functioning in universities for a long time and seems to work very well.

Arguably this means that fifty years down the line you end up with people who should be achieving far higher grades than people do now, getting the same grades but who really cares? Exam grades are really about employers and universities being able to differentiate between people and once you have a degree or a job nobody really gives a crap about your GCSEs and A-Levels so what does it even matter if that is the case?