lyrics

My Pre-Travel Blog, Post

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[PHOTO: everything I travelled with over the 3 weeks; the rucksack I use for work, and a mini rucksack that just about holds my camera and purse]



So, I’ve been struggling to decide how to start these next 3, inevitably looonngg, blog posts about my Chinese New Year travels… I guess it would make sense to start at the beginning right? I mean, “let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start..” But these tales aren’t bookended by a musical do… they start and end with a mixture of excitement, worry, and uncertainty. One constant throughout my trip however, was that I was constantly learning. They say travel is the best form of education, life education that is, and I definitely did a lot of learning over the past 3 weeks. From doing research on my destinations, managing my money in both China and the UK, learning how to travel with a variety of different people, learning how to take my trip into my own hands, and so much more… (I also learnt that I’m not as good at the limbo as I used to be, but I’ll come back to that sad fact)

Well, my trip was clearly and easily broken down into 3 solid sections:

  1. Tokyo
  2. Seoul
  3. Thailand

So this is how I’ll be forming my travel blog posts. It’s going to take some time for me to get everything down, I can see it being over a month before I wrap things up and get to type up the words “and then I was back in my teeny but homey apartment in Country Garden.” But I don’t mind too much, it’s always nice to re-live the travel experiences and this will be a good way to prolong the feeling and memory of travel. Plus, it will mean you guys, my few but reliable readers, don’t have just one HUGE post to read, which would inevitably bore you to death.

At this very moment, I’m typing this up (on my phone) on Saturday at 9am… no I’m not at home in bed with a cuppa, I’m sat in one of the school theatres, while someone stands on stage, chattering away in Chinese, and all the international staff sit here with headphones in listening to some poor Chinese lady try and translate as quickly as she can. To my left, is another international teacher looking through photos on her laptop. To my right is a Chinese teacher reading a children’s English book. All around me I can see everyone on their phones, reading books, on their laptops, or just outright sleeping…

Anyway, this is a pointless blog post so I’ll cut it off here before I woffle on even more. Thanks for reading folks, and I look forward to sharing my travel adventures with you “all”.

Peace out!

Getting Lost in Documentation

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[Photo: a collage of some of my New Zealand photos from Dec. 2015 to give an overview of my time there]

Ok, so this blog post did not grow from a Post-a-Day Prompt, nor was it inspired by a wild and wonderful adventure. I don’t quite know where it’s going to go; I’ll figure that out along the way, I guess that’s how some authors work right? They don’t always know where their characters will end up, they don’t know what the grand finale will be, it’s just as much a surprise to them as it is to us, the reader.

I’ve been wondering for a couple of days what my next blog post will be about, I was starting to worry that without some amazing travel experience, I have nothing to say. When I started this blog, it wasn’t about that. Truthfully, when I started this blog, I was struggling to internally process some things, (mainly the whole Medical Photographer opportunity/moving to Foshan on my own), and I was able to just write and write with relative ease. I’d sit at my desk in work, and, shamefully, with such little photographic work left at the end of the academic year, I was able to spend some of my time tapping away at my school laptop and post a “blog-a-day”. Now I’m not at work, I’m sat on a friend’s sofa, surrounded by no one and nothing apart from my music, I’ve been struggling for inspiration, and the words haven’t been flowing as easy as before. My last post was easy, Thailand. Who wouldn’t be able to write a (relatively long) blog post about 5 days in that beautiful country? This one however, is very different. This one is much more personal, and goes back to Continue reading →