GoGo Little Dragons!

I have done it! I have visited all 120 little dragons around Norwich! Took me a while since I was mainly doing it on Lunch breaks and stuff, but Thursday’s are my day off and I finally had nothing else to do, so I could romp around the city and find the others that I hadn’t yet!

Officically this part is called GoGoSchools, but I think GoGo Little Dragons suits it better.

You can find a link to the entire albums for like 350 photos here, but I’m going to showcase some of my favourites for you here.

Starting with, the rainbow club! We have, Skittles, Colour Burst. I love a good rainbow, and these are favourites. Also a shout out to one of my readers who has informed me his son’s school painted Skittles – here he is in all his window glory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next, we have Rainbow. Weirdly, not quite a rainbow in himself, but I love the marbelling effect that was used to create his skin. I remember painted marbles and rolling them around tins, best sorts of art are created with random objects and fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two very sparkly ones now, Sparky (apologies for the lighting, it was in a dark room) and Fearsome Francis the Fiery. Sparky was very nicely made with lovely rich colours and hints of sparkling in places. Francis could also belong in rainbow club, making her double cool, but there was so much glitter on her, I had to put her in here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As well as the dragon statue itself, there can be awesome things painted on it, like Scales and Stories had lots of things, including more dragons (can you see who is painted here on the left? Made me grin a lot) painted inside it’s big scales. Cosmos on the right had runes painted into his wings, which I found rather cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I love the artwork on these two – Vincent van GoGo, obviously replicating sunflowers, and Tell me a Dragon had the seasons painted over him. He also had some story lines, and is located in an awesome local bookshop. Got to love stories and dragons in the same instance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This dragon is called Browick. He’s in here because he’s my best friends favourite dragon that he saw when he came round and amused me for an afternoon by finding all 19 dragons living on one of the Malls in Norwich. We got badges for doing so ^.^ And it is adorable to see a dragon in school uniform.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And lastly I show you Cosmic. I’ve probably said that Draco is one of my favourite big ones, so you can see why I like Cosmic so much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basically the same! So cute.

At the end of the trail, all the little dragons go back to the schools that made them. So whilst I am sad that I cannot nab one of them for myself, it’ll be lovely for the kids that had a hand in decorating them to keep a hold of them. And I have lots of lovely pictures.

And sometime in the future (hopefully soon) I will have my own tiny version of Draco to have an love. And I’ve bought ticket to the auction so I can see all the dragons go onto their new homes. I’ve mostly been convinced that buying one for myself is a bad idea since I have nowhere to put it and technically there are a lot of other things I could spend that amount of money on.

Mostly convinced.

Dragons on a Thursday

Well hello there gorgeous!

So I have this beautiful little lady now in my study, looking over at me. She’s got the perfect space in her tail for a d20 dice, and she can keep an eye on me as I write (or don’t). The perfect companion for me 🙂

So yesterday I was telling you about how I wasn’t feeling myself lately. Today, however, was different.

I got to sleep in, which is always a nice start to the day, and then my best friend, who I don’t get to see in real life enough, came up for the day.

We went and got sushi.

We found 19 mini dragons in one of the malls.

We got badges as a reward.

We played little big planet.

He’s just left for home and we’ll play some Heroes of the Storm when he gets back.

Aren’t best friends amazing?

Good food, fun activities, and a person to share it with. That got me out of my funk (although I have just gotten rather annoyed at my tablet and connecting cable, as they seem to refuse to transfer picture from tablet to computer)

And we got to see quite a few of the baby dragons that are around the city! Same as their 84 large brethren, just smaller, 120 dragons painted by schools from the area are around the city in shop windows and retail stores. We saw some of the ones in the forum, and the 19 in Castle Mall, receiving a rather nice badge for the trouble of doing so 🙂 I’ve been meaning to do them for a little while, but I keep being busy with stuff. So it was nice to get it started.

I also found that they’ve done an official guide for the GoGoDragons, released this week. I picked up a copy, of course, so I now have a book with picture of all the dragons from all angles, with the information about the sponsor and the artist and inspiration for each of the designs, it was just what I was looking for, without even knowing it.

So yes, it was just a bit of a passing low point. Lots of dragons, and a good dollop of friends has helped me get out of it.

I will be posting up an album of the little dragons, but I’ll be doing it after I visited them all, so give me a little more time 🙂

GoGoDragons!

I DID IT!

All 84 of the large dragons have now been visited! Photographed! Mascoted!

I have of course taken lots and lots and lots of photo’s for you to view here (you should be able to see that album, please comment if you can’t).

But here are my favourite ones, just to show them off:

#13 – Webby. A lovely drawing of a map of Norwich done in parchment style.

#6 – Norwich Twilight. A lovely scene of famous building in Norwich at twilight.

#16 – GoGoSteggles. A tribute to the Japanese legend of koi fish swimming upstream and turning into dragon upon reaching the dragon gate.

#51 – Sapphire. A fabric covered dragon, whom I absolutely love the style of! Button and fabric scales! So cool.

#73 – Dennis. A here there be dragon style map dragon.

#43 – GoGoMosaic. Super shiny and pretty with all of the glittering pieces.

#29 – Draco. Painted in the image of the constellation in the sky.

Of course there are many more dragons, several of which I really like, and even more which I admire the artwork of. There’s some fantastic art going on round Norwich right now!

The small dragons are set to hit the streets next weekend, and thankfully those are more concentrated in smaller areas, so I’ll be able to save my poor feet from walking quite so far! (I already have a list fo where they all are).

At some point I’m planning to do a speed run as well. This round trip took my 14 hours to do. If I get my car and bike I want to try and beat the 8 hours 45 minutes it took the first group to complete it! I do need to take the app round there and get my pings for having visited the dragons (my phone died really early on Thursday, so I couldn’t do it this time round).

But, ignoring all future plans for the dragons, I had a super fun time chasing them all down. It was an amazing couple of days, and I am definitely very, very happy right now.

Not Quite to Plan

So as I have been mentioned, I now have Thursdays off, and since GoGoDragons! is now live and in my city, I was quite open about that was what I was going to do yesterday.

It didn’t quite go to plan.

I’m six short.

So there are 84 of these gorgeous beasts around town, and although I started at 9am in the morning, by 10pm I still wasn’t done. And I had blisters. And two of those blisters had popped.

Yeah…I’m having trouble walking today.

I decided to stop the trail because my feet were very painful, the sun had set and I wasn’t going to get good photo’s in the dark, and I found the dragon I was hunting next – on the other side of the river (with no bridges in sight) >.<

So, please be patient with me. I will be posting all of the photos from GoGoDragons, but I will hold off until I have ALL of them found. Since I have work today (Friday) this likely means I’ll finish up on Saturday.

Of course, I am sad that I couldn’t do them all in one day, but I suspect having to go very far out of town to track down the ones at the airport, and two that were in pubs reeeeeaaaalllllyyyy far out of town damaged my chances greatly (waiting for the return bus for an hour didn’t help either, I’m sure). But, there’s comes a point where you do have to listen to your feet screaming at you. Thankfully I have the best boyfriend, and he took care of me when I stumbled back into the flat at half ten that evening.

But it really was the best day out, even with the painful feet!

GoGoDragons, Stickers & Surprises

So, if you live in Norwich or have been keeping up with my posts here, you might know that GoGoDragon officially launched on Sunday!

Unfortunately, I had to be an adult over the weekend, and do adult things, which mainly involved shopping for a new car and checking the terms and conditions of cancelling my insurance, ect. I had to be all grown up, which meant that I couldn’t get out and do the trail on Sunday when it started 😦

Needless to say, this has made me sad. I’m following it all on facebook and twitter, and so many other people have already been doing the trail and posting pictures, and my friends are walking past some on the way to work (I pass none, none! walking to work).

HOWEVER, I work part time. This means I have Thursday’s off. This means that this Thursday, as in two days time, I am going to wake up early, put on real clothes, and romp around the city finding all the dragons and taking massive amounts of pictures. The weather forecast says it’s going to be cloudy, but not rainy. A day long bus ticket is going to cost me £4.80, so I can visit the slightly out of town ones easier. I’m going to take all the photo’s off my tablet to maximise the space on there. I need to pick a cuddly toy I’m going to take around with me and feature in the photographs (yes, I of course have a rather large choice of cuddly dragons). I am carefully planning my day so that I will be able to visit all 84 dragons in one day, and then I will have seen them all, all 84 of the large sparkly dragons which I so desperately want to seeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Eh hem.

Of course, I will probably go again. The little dragons will be hitting the streets on 4th July (although they are still living at my work for now), and at some point I’m getting a camera from my mum to take to Costa Rica, so I’ll do the whole trail again with a better camera (my tablet is good enough, but a real camera will be much better).

But, there is one thing I’ve been able to do so far – sticker album!

The album I got about a week ago, but the stickers only went on sale yesterday (Monday). I managed to not buy like ten packets, because you get vouchers in the newspaper for a free pack, one each day, so I’m pacing myself. I got two packets yesterday (work are allowing me to cut out the voucher from their copy at the end of the day) and I’ll get similar numbers for the next couple of weeks. There are 150 stickers in total, and when you get to 130, you can go into the newspaper office and buy your last 20! I love stickers, and collecting things. I’m going to have so much fun with this.

 

So that’s happening now and coming up. Thankfully, over the weekend, there were a couple of surprise dragons for me!

Firstly, my kickstarter arrived!

Earth Dragons and other rare forest creatures! I think I’ve said before how much I love this artist, she’s super talented. And the next project – metal dragons – is already live. Go check it out. It’s met like ten stretch goals without even being halfway through it’s time. I like the postcards, bookmarks, playing cards and hardback books, but I am being tempted by the how to draw and colouring in ones this time.

The other surprise, and this one really was a surprise, was when me and the partner decided to spend our Friday evening taking in a movie and this was outside the theatre:

Dragon! Fighting a Knight! On a Castle!

I was super happy and squealing when I saw it. Looking on the internet, it turns out it is linked into the GoGoDragons as well. It’s called Duelling Dragons sculpture and was a precursor to the GoGoDragons reveal. It’s quite an amazing piece of metal sculpting, and I was certainly very happy to see it (and surprised that something dragon related happening in my city slipped by me!).

I’m holding in the enthusiasm until Thursday, but a warning that the next week or so will be very dragon intensive on this blog!

 

 

GoGo Warm Up

So, I promised you a dragon post, and a dragon post you shall have.

GoGoDragons is going to hit the streets of Norwich on 21st June, and that means that the city is starting to gear up for the plethora of dragons that are going to descend on it.

Even my work has been affected. I’ve already written two dragon related blog posts for the library blog, persuaded our finance guy to buy a couple of books (actually, it’s in the picture below), and the best thing? The college is storing all the mini dragon until they get put out on the streets!

Aren’t they gorgeous? A whole room, filled with at least 70 of these beauties. Paradise!

Just a small selection of the ones that caught my eye. I promise, when they hit the streets, there will be a lot more photos. Individual ones. I will overload you with photos.

And because of this, the bookstores have been having dragon displays. I showed you one in a recent post. I also found that Jarrolds, our local department store, has also had a big display of all sort of dragon books. So much so that I have another horde of books sitting on my pile.

So there’s three story books, a Dragonology book, and a lovely little thin book called Norwich City of Dragon, which has been published locally by Book Wyrm Books. It takes you around the city of Norwich with lots of dragons all over the city, in the spirit of the event. That’s the one I’ve hopefully persuaded the library to pick up a copy of.

The two pale blue books are going to be interesting to read. It takes place in Wales, which you know I am involved in (still learning Welsh!) and the author is coming to my local Waterstones book shop early July. A big dragon themed author event. I am totally going, and I am very much going to enjoy it.

I also popped some books back to the library, and in the small shop on the way out, I spotted the display they had in the tourist information shop. And I picked up these two lovelies.

I haven’t had a chance to play the board game yet (I feel sleep due to my cold when people came round my flat) but I love the dragon cuddly toy. It’s super soft, and great to cuddly on the sofa. But, it doesn’t have a name as of yet. Taking suggestions from you, my lovely readers. What do you think I should name my Norwich dragon?

Go Go Dragons – In Progress

Yesterday I was wondering around the shopping centre, and I stumbled across a pop up shop.

GoGo Dragons 2015. I think I might have mentioned this before in a post. There are going to be loads upon loads of dragons, small and big, posted around Norwich on a treasure trail type of adventure. Looking up the official website there will be 80 large sculptures, and 100 small ones.

So they start off plain like this chap here, who’s a small dragon, and then they get painted up.

The shop behind this guy has been set up for the artists who are painting the dragons to come in and paint them! So you can actually see the works in progress as they are being created. It was amazing.

Of course I took some pictures.

 

 

 

 

And then at the forum (local library/exhibition space/coffee house/broadcasting place), I bumped into this guy. He’s sitting next to a wooden wishing well and he’s going to be decorated with 2p coins. I of course immediately found all the 2 pence pieces in my purse and dropped them in. I looked forward to seeing him when he’s done.

 

The dragons will be hitting the streets of Norwich from June 21st until the 5th September. I think it’s a safe bet to say, that come June there will be a lot of photo’s I will be posting here.

Go Go Dragons

At the moment, what I am currently excited about (excited about dragon wise at least) is the Go Go Dragon project which will be coming to my home town of Norwich next year.

The Go Go trails are trails run by charities where large animals (last time it was gorillas) are painted up by professional artists and then you follow the trail around the city.

In previous posts I have said how much dragons are linked into the city of Norwich: Check out F – Festival. So the next trail that they are doing is dragons! And I think it goes without saying that I cannot wait!

There is also a competition being run by the local newspaper to design the dragon that is going to sit outside of their office. Needless to say, I have printed off several blank dragons, and am thinking up designs to put on them. My first one has a bunch of writing paraphernalia all over it, and my second one is going to be the four seasons is changing order.

Thankfully I don’t think I have to be that great an artist (I wish I was better) because a professional is going to be the one painting it, we just have to submit a design. So, if you were going to design a dragon, what would you put on it?

F – Festival

Hello! I had a busy weekend, how about you? Now that I have done my requsite half day of work to make up the time I took off, I can bring you today’s post, which is about festivals! We’re going to look at three different festivals.

Chinese New Year

Whilst this tends to happen in february time for us, chinese new year is a really big celebration over there, and whilst there are lots of things that happen at new years (the celebrations last for fifteen whole days) one of the customs is the Dragon Dance.

In China, dragons are helpful and friendly creatures, and are linked with good luck, long life, and wisdom. They are associated with storm-clouds and rain, as it was often thought that the dragons controlled the weather, and thus gave the people bountiful harvests. In the New Year’s celebrations, dragons dances are performed to ward off evil spririts, and to bring good luck with them into the new year.

The dragons that are used in the dances themselves are very colourful, although often red since that is the chinese colour of luck, and can be any length fro a few metres to hundreds of meters long, taking multiple people to hold the poles that span the dragon and make it dance. Sometimes there is one man who holds the ‘Pearl of Wisdom’, and he will go at the front, and the dragon will then chase after the pearl, seeking wisdom and knowledge.

The longer the dragons, and the longer the dance goes on for, the more luck is brought by the dragon into the new year, so dragon dances tend to go on until the dancers are too tired to carry on!

 

Dragon Boat Racing

Another festival that started in China, this is now celebrated around the world. A dragon boat is a long canoe which is decorated with a dragon head and tail, and sometimes scales if feeling decorative, and then used in a race. Teams of people will paddle the boat down a course in races agaisnt other teams in order to win!

Typically these days it is done in order to raise money for charity, and lots of coporations have dragon boat days where families will get together and make a day of it. Since it tends to happen in June/July, it makes a rather good day out, as long as the weather holds.

This events is traditionally supposed to take place on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month, at the time of the annual Duanwu Festival, and was thought to have originated over 2,500 years ago, possibly around the same time as the greek olympic games. It is thought that it was one of the main events of an important festival in the agricultural community, part of the water rituals and celebration of the summer harvest.

 

Norwich Dragon Festival

I know, my home city has a dragon festival, how freaking cool is that! (For those of you that do not know, I live in Norwich, England, as in the UK. *waves hello to any international folk*)

The only down side was that I was at work whilst it was going on, so I didn’t get to go to many of the talk that were happening because they were all at 2pm *sad face*.

But I did get to do some bits of it, and I can tell you about Dragons in Norwich as well.

Norwich Dragon Festival Trailer

Snap is the Norwich processional dragon, and has been with the city since the 15th century, back in a time where the world was filled with saints and guilds. The dragon, with it’s ability to breathe fire and eat people, was seen as one of the most terrifying beasts around, and was seen as a powerful symbol in art. Art was prevailent since most people at the time could not read or write, but dragons were almost always depicted being defeated by one of three popular saints: Saint Micheal the Archangel, Saint Margaret of Antioch, or the most famous of all, Saint George.

The story of Saint George goes that there was a ferocious dragon living outside of a city, and the people did not want it to eat them, so left an offering or two sheep each day for the dragon to eat. Eventually though, then ran out of sheep, so they started to leave one human for it to eat, every day, who was chosen by lot. Until one day, the King’s daughter was chosen. She was awaiting her fate at the mouth of the dragon’s cave when George happened to pass by on horseback: he attacked the dragon, and killed it, freeing the city from it’s reign of terror (and converting them all to Christians).

The tale originated in Saxon times, but became very popular around the time of the crusades. Saint George also became associated with the city of Norwich, and at time has often been said to be the patron saint of the city, and we have two churches here dedicated to him, St George Colegate and St George Tombland, with images of him and the dragon prevailent in the stain glass and artwork around these churches, as well as many others in the city (Norwich is said to have a pub for every day of the year, and a church for every week. We have the most churches per thousand population in Europe I believe.).

Eventually Saint George got his own guild in the city, that was founded in 1385. They held services and raised money for a statue of the saint to be built in the city. Enough famous knights were in the guild, and helped out in the battles of the time that in 1417 King Henry V granted the guild a royal charter. It was around this time (specifically survving records date from 1420) that we find mention of the dragon for the first time, in a procession held by the guild in the town, where Saint George would do battle with the dragon as the procession went through the town. This procession got more and more elaborate as the centuried went on, and the dragon got rebuilt and refurbished many time, but was always reffered to as a Snap Dragon, for his moving head and snapping jaws.

By the 18th Century the guild had ceased to exist, but the Snap Dragon could still been seen in the annual procession, but this time it was in the Lord Mayor’s procession. Even today, the dragon is still a big part of the Lord Mayor’s procession every year, although few people know that it dates back to the fight of Saint Geroge and the Dragon, covering over six centuries of local history, and simple call him the Norwich Dragon Snap!

Phew! That was a lot of local history for you!

There were things that I got to do which didn’t involve history. Arts and crafts for the kids (I snagged some colouring in pages and did them at home) as well as ‘The Dragon Spell’ – a hunt across the city to find the letters of the dragon’s spell (so much fun!) and a performance of a metal, firebreathing dragon by Dragon Heart Beats. Watch part of the performance here:

Dragon Heart Beats

I found the dragon hunt very fun, and I have a postcard up on my wall to prove that I did it. There is also a poem (the first letter of each line made up the dragon’s spell, it was so cool!) which I was going to put in this post, but then it got really long. Although if people want to see it, I can put it in another post or something. It was written by George Szirtes especially for the festival and everything 🙂

 

 

So there you have it, Dragon Festivals. Hope you’re still enjoying April. I now have to go and find something to eat because I’ve just realised that the last thign I ate was breakfast seven hours ago!

Day 9: A person you would love to meet

Stephen Fry.

It wouldn’t even have to be for very long, but he’s a Norfolk boy and I love this town/county so much since I have moved here. He went to Cambridge university where I went for a year. He’s a famous homosexual who stands up for equal rights. And QI is a great programming to watch and I love him in other things such as Bones and films like Sherlock Holmes 2. He’s a great and talented man and I would love to meet him.