On this year’s Mother’s Day, Bishops’ House in Sheffield host a butter-making workshop to let people try how mums in Tudor Times made butter.
Built in around 1500, Bishops’ House is the best preserved timber–framed house in Sheffield.
Author Archives: Shawn Wang
Council to have greater controls over strip clubs
Sheffield City Council will have more powers to regulate strip clubs.
Sheffield City Council will have more powers to regulate premises where striptease, lap dancing or any “sexually stimulating” shows are presented.
Sheffield City Council’s Licensing Committee has established a draft Sexual Entertainment Venue Policy. The council will refuse a licence application if the venue is close to any school, park, church, city landmark or tourist attraction in this city.
The committee also set fees for sexual entertainment venues as £1,335 for grant and £1,000 for renewal. They are subject to a consultation being undertaken till this Friday and will be placed to the committee on 7th April for approval.
“This is a reasonable fee,” said Steve Lonnia, Acting Head of Licensing.
“You will be amazed by the fees charged across the country,” he said.
New laws introduce the concept of “sexual entertainment venues” which provide live performance “solely or principally for the purpose of sexually stimulating any member of an audience”, like strip shows and peep shows. It is aiming at discouraging the increase of lap dancing venues nationally which have become concerns for many local communities.
Previously these venues only needed to be licensed for music and dancing. Licensing authorities could not refuse an application unless it was for prevention of crime, disorder or public nuisance, or for protection of children or public safety.
Currently the Licensing Committee is only aware of three such venues operating in Sheffield. The new laws adopted by Full Council earlier this month will come into force on 1st May. Then applicants can submit their applicants for sexual entertainment venues and local community can have the chance to make comments on specific applications.
Sheffielders enjoy indoor dragon boat racing
Sheffield people now have a chance to try the acient sport of dragon boat racing which helps cancer survivors improve health and well-being.
A dragon boat is a 30 or 40 foot canoe-like vessel with a gorgeously carved dragon’s head and tail, a drummer beating time and about 20 people sitting in pairs ready to paddle. An ancient Chinese tradition with over 2000 years of history, dragon boat racing is now enjoyed by a group of cancer surviviors on Lake Windermere.
Sports enineering technicians, industrial products designers, health researchers and film makers from Sheffield Hallam University recreated a dragon boat model in Winter Garden. With the help of remote technology and visual arts, people can paddle indoor without getting wet.
This interactive exhibition lasts till 18 March and is part of the National Science and Engineering Week 2011 in South Yorkshire.
Sheffield Uni to host ‘languages buffet’
First International Languages Festival in Sheffield
In the Book of Genesis, the whole earth used to be of one language. People resolved to build an enormous tower, known as the Tower of Babel, with its top to the heavens. But it was never finished. God came down and confounded people’s language so that they couldn’t understand one another’s speech. Now ethnologists estimate over 6000 languages and dialects are used across the globe. Sheffield University offers people a chance to taste nearly 150 of them over this weekend by hosting the first international languages festival in the UK.
Apart from traditionally popular languages like Spanish and German, there is also a wide selection of African languages, Chinese dialects and English dialects, and even Esperanto, sign language and Braille. All classes are in the form of 40-minute interactive presentations given by teachers and students of Sheffield University as well as guests lecturers, including Mr Tsering Gonkatsang from Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, who is going to teach Tibetan language.
“It’s like a languages buffet in which you can have a taste of everything,” said Di Dai, sponsorship coordinator of the festival.
The International Languages Festival was first founded in Tours, France in 1995, by a master of Esperanto named Dennis Keefe. Since then the idea has spread to Russia, Finland and China. This time it comes to Sheffield, UK.
Max Marzec, a third year undergrad at Sheffield University, helped Mr Keefe organise the festival at Nanjing University in China last year when he was studying there as an exchange student. He decided to bring this “absolutely splendid” concept back to UK.
He said organising the festival in the UK was far more challenging. In China, English is a compulsory module at school and people feel the need to learn foreign languages to communicate with the rest of the world. “But here, since everybody speaks English, people may wonder why bother learning another language.” he said.
But in this global world being able to speak more than one languages can be massively rewarding, especially in job hunting. “Today many international companies value language ability a lot,” said Max Marzec.
Majoring in Chinese studies with German, this 20-year-old Polish man has a good command of seven languages and has been working as a part-time English and Chinese teacher since high school. He said to learn a whole new language one needed to be a child again to experience the world. “Imagine the days when you were a toddler and kept asking ‘what’s that, mama?’”
Of course no one can become as multilingual as him by simply taking some 40-minute lessons, but they can be a very good starting point.
“Some people may have passion with grammar, but I’m not one of them,” said Max Heckl, a German student now studying screen translation at Sheffield University. He is going to teach basic German in the coming festival.
He said he would tell his students what kind of problems they might encounter if they wanted to take German seriously in the future, but at this stage an overview of the cultural background of the language as well as the country was more suitable.
Max Heckl said:“Learning a foreign language is not all about that you can go to another country and be able to order beer there. It’s about getting close to the culture.”
The Lord Mayor of Sheffield will attend the opening ceremony on Friday 11th March, at 5:30 in the Richard Roberts Auditorium. The festival itself will take place on 12th and 13th March in the Hicks Building. Tickets are £2 per day. Both university students and local people are welcome.