Ballooning over Bagan

The highlight of our time in Bagan was seeing the temples from a hot air balloon.  It’s an expensive trip, but utterly worth it. It was my first time in…

Travelling Across Generations: Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls (a.k.a. “The Smoke That Thunders” is truly a wonderful site. The falls border Zimbabwe and Zambia was seen by my grandmother in 1925 and myself in 1998. I…

Temples of Old Bagan, Myanmar

Plains of Temples OK not everyone’s cup of tea, but for an art history nerd, this sounded intriguing and I knew that we had to go. Bagan was for a…

Highlights of Yangon, Myanmar

Yangon, formerly Rangoon, formerly capital of Myanmar was our entry and exit point for our trip to Myanmar.  We ended up spending about 4 days there all in all. 1…

Shwedagon Pagoda, Yangon

If you had only enough time in Yangon for one site, then you’d make it the Shwedagon Pagoda. The centre of this large complex is a big, golden stupa.  Around…

A Day at the Museums

With a couple of days off school we took advantage to avoid the crowds and went to two museums in one day.  First we went to the Hong Kong Museum…

Mrs Chiu’s Art room – online!

In a quest to develop my tech skills and make my classroom more accessible to parents I’ve created a google site for my classroom activities.  It’s a place to showcase…

Breaking Faces: Cubist Self-Portraits

My grade 8 students have just finished doing a unit on self-portraits. After mastering (more or less) the facial proportions in a self-portrait colour pencil drawing, I then told them…

Third time lucky – we finally made it to Myanmar!

This last trip had been a long time coming. In 2007 Andrew and I planned to go to Myanmar. Despite reservations about supporting the regime, a friend of ours had…

School Adventures in Bali: an evening of cooking

Our student group went to Keliki, the village near our resort, for an evening of preparing and cooking a traditional Balinese meal (followed of course, by eating said meal).  The…