Good and Bad Things About Raining

Raining is vital for many creatures and plants living on the planet.  Raining is the main source of water which causes the soil to become wet and let plants flourish.  People build canals and dams to supply water to the farms, but the water mainly originates from rain.  People can easily live where there is water and water can only be found where it rains.  So there is an eternal connection between life being and raining.  The positive impacts of raining are not just limited to feeding plants and animals, it also causes the weather to be cleaned.  Raining also transfers a significant proportion of fertilisers from the surface to underneath and helps seeds to grow.  The life of human and all other animals are directly and indirectly depended to the life of plants. If there are no plants animals could not live either.  So together with the sunshine, air, and soil, it is the raining that makes life possible on Earth. 

Along with having a critical role in nature, rain has a huge potential for creating problems as well.  In many places on the Earth heavy rain leads to floods. People have experienced many natural floods because of plenty of rain.  Too much rain may cause the roads to be blocked, power networks to be damaged and the drainages to be destroyed.  In some places, particularly in less developed countries, raining resulted in muddy houses collapsing and people being injured and killed.  There is also a possibility of landslides because of continuing rain in some areas. 

All in all like many other natural phenomenons rain also has positive and negative impacts. 

Good and Bad Things in the Last Holidays

During the last holidays, some good things happened to me.  In the first week, all our family went to Stanwell Park, in the south west of Sydney.  There were many people in the park with their friends and families. You could easily notice that everyone was delighted with the beauty of nature. The top hill provides a unique view of the sea.  A group of hang gliders flew down from the peak of the hills. They flew off the cliffs and returned from over the sea. 

There were other good things in the second week when we prepared for an Afghani cuisine called Manto. We’ve brought the dish from overseas, but we never used that. During this holiday we tried to use the dish for the first time here in Australia and that was a new experience made the entire of the day fun.

Having not good experiences along with good things makes life consistent.  However nothing bad happened to me during the last holidays, but sometimes I felt boring staying at home all week.  But never mind that is life and we need come along.  Imagine if there were always just good thing happened to us, maybe life would be completely meaningless. 

My Typical Day

For me a typical day starts from 1:00 am at midnight. Every night I wake up and start working at around 1 am. I’m studying and working on the contemporary history of my country and trying to incorporate some of those historical events in a fictional work. Reading, taking notes, and thinking about historical moments are the important parts of my daily activity.

I work for around 3-4 hours until I fall asleep in the early morning. My clock rings at around 10:00 am and make me wake up. I do a simple exerciser before having some simple breakfast and then I get ready to leave my house for college. 
From 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm I attend English class at EFP level and then get back home at around 6:00 pm. I do my homework right after having lunch and do some other home-related jobs till evening. 
I have my dinner at around 8:00 pm. I rarely watch TV and mostly I view videos on YouTube and doing some entertain. I also chat with my friends on Facebook and other social networks. I go to bed at 9:00 pm and thus far my typical day finishes and starts again.

Sydney

Sydney has many interesting places to see and things to do.  Just a few hundred meters from the Circular Quay you can find the Opera House.  The Opera House is a unique building, located exactly on the harbour in front of the Rocks. The Rocks is where many historical buildings stretch alongside the harbour. You can catch up and chat with a Sydney sider on a cup of coffee in any of those open coffee hopes. From the Opera House, you can see the Harbour Bridge which connects north and south of Sydney’s Central Business District (CBD). Behind the Opera House is the Botanic Garden which is flourishing all months of the year.  You can see different tropical flowers and trees in this garden.  Sydney Tower stands at the heart of the city. It is 309 meters high. The top of the Sydney Tower provides a unique observatory point by which you can see all around the city. Just a few kilometers from the CBD, there are sandy beaches like Bondi Beach, Manly Beach and many others. People play, swim, surf and have sun showers on the beaches. In some area of the Sydney beaches there colourful creatures called coral polyps. These beaches are appropriate for discovering marine lives by snorkeling and scuba diving. 

Sydney is an expensive place to live in. More than four million people with deferent backgrounds live in Sydney. This makes Sydney one of the biggest metropolitan cities.  Living in such a vibrant city with a first class standard has a higher cost of living. Many people prefer to live in Sydney, which causes the rent for accommodation to get higher every year.  The daily expenses of a middle-class family in Sydney is almost equal to a week in many other cities in the world, particularly in central Asia. The weekly rent that I pay for a house here in Sydney is quite enough to get a big luxury villa in Kabul for an entire month.  Sydney is the world’s second most expensive city following Tokyo, Japan.   

All in all, Sydney is a paradise that you can’t get it easily.  Art galleries, museums,  big and spacious aquariums full of sea life, iconic buildings, gigantic structures, beaches, gardens and above all the cultural diversity make Sydney with almost unlimited attractions. I’m happy living in this nice, beautiful city where there you can find a variety of lifestyles and a system of governance that respects diversity.

Photo by Taqi Bakhtyari

History and Fiction

In what ways is history like fiction?

1.     Historical ‘facts’ are not valid and relevant anymore because of disciplinary boundaries in historiography.

2.     History as a textual product involves both ‘finding’ and ‘invention’ by an author who is himself subject to ideology.

3.     Fiction narrates for now from a time other than now. Likewise, history seeks solutions to today's issues in the past.

4.     History is a textual interpretation of the past, and yet, this text is open to interpretation.

In what year are The Children of the King set? How did you work this out? What does the novel say about history?

There is no indication in The Children of the King that London bombardment had begun. In World War II, Germans bombardments against London started in September 1940. Furthermore, in the novel, May says that her father “went to France,” (p.38) to defend that country. By mid-1940, the French resistance had come to an end. The story tells of evacuation just prior to the bombardment which happened after falling of France. Therefore, The Children of the King is set in 1940, precisely in the “summer” (p.42). The small conflicts between characters in the story and the big war between the countries are intertwined to demonstrate that everything is connected, and history is a concomitant result of interactions between people throughout the time.

Zohar Shavit on "I Was a Rat"

This is a short outline of Zohar Shavit's analysis and her arguments and interpretations on the story I Was a Rat. Shavit's work was published in the book titled The Concept of Childhood and Children's Folktales by Norton, New York in 1999. 

1.     Historically there was no distinction between children and adults because life was considered as analogous to that of nature.

2.     Then, children perceived as delicate needed protection and education according to pedagogical goals that demanded books.

3.     Upper-class regarded folktales “childish”, and yet they enjoyed but only vicariously through children.

4.     For social acceptance, authors called children as an official audience, by the mid-nineteenth century this was not possible as the child was distinct from the adult with special needs and abilities.

5.     Childhood determines folktales change and purposes, e.g. “educational” concept replaced “amusement”.

Featuring pages of the local paper “The Daily Scourge” in I Was a Rat, one can use Shavit’s argument to analyse the story in the way it refers to how media draw public attention by providing false information which is the dominance contemporary phenomenon.