andresworld.co.uk » Travelling

The London Design Festival

Andy — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 15:51:00 +0000

Righty, well! The observant amongst you might notice that although this post says that it was written on the 26th of September it in fact wasn’t. Basically, I’ve been up to a fair bit lately and rather than let my laziness be reflected on my site I’ll just cheat instead. So, Scooby Doo style time travel back to September….

Some people are just very particular about others using their equipment

I’ve just got back from London [ahem] where I’ve spent the last twelve days or so. A big thanks to Fash, Will, Ed and Dave for being so patient and offering me a roof over my head. I think I’ve successfully earned the title ‘squater’. The main reason for my trip was to volunteer and earn myself some valuable creative industry brownie points. However that didn’t stop me going to Fabric first… The night before I was due to start.

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|DJ Yoda Super Mario Bros Video|

I was dead chuffed with that shot. I did it all myself

The first weekend of the London Design Festival was pretty quiet, however the area around the South Bank centre was not, because all weekend it was the Thames River Festival! Kate and her bar crew were working it too so a few sneaky free cans of heineken and no tea and I was on my way for a great night. And of course Cat was working Saturday night, and so was my bestest West Country pal Brendan [kidding Kate].

Cat came up again on the Sunday with her mum and we watched the carnival and the fireworks to finish it all off. They were awesome. So awesome that in a fit of pyromania I recorded the whole display on my spangly new camera.

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|Thames River Festival Fireworks Video|

No, we didn’t get to drive them

So finally the actual reason for my trip down to London in the first place [other than to escape the siege at home]. The London Design Festival was an eleven day long series of design orientated events across London. I volunteered to help out on the nitty gritty elements of running a festival but was pleasantly surprised when the rest of the volunteers and I were able to get into London and report back for the Backstage Blog.

In addition to the 7:30am starts [for the FT of course], 10 hour days, blogging, vlogging, and heavy lifting I did get to see some awesome design, learn ALOT, eat some free food and drink the occasional free beer/cocktail [simple things for simple folk]. I was also really fortunate to sit in on i-Design: Design for life talks which focused on digital design and how it is affecting, and can affect our lives. I even asked a question and referenced Bertrand Russell, I was shot down pretty quick mind.

And of course I spent 11 days with some really cool people. I’d like to thank Will [the man behind this] for giving me the opportunity to get involved, and also a big hand to Jay who would have been my podcast partner in crime had the technology worked, but instead just gave me advice on life [not a bad trade I reckon].

Amsterdam

Andy — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 12:22:00 +0000

Well its now more than a week since we left for ‘The Dam’, and if I remember correctly it was a darn sight sunnier in Holland than it is here in miserable wet Manchester, but hey, Manchester has hills and you can’t have it all.

I won’t blab on too great a deal as I imagine the majority of you are sick to death of my ramblings about… well, sick. You can find the photos from the trip here and the main video from the journey here. Unfortunately there aren’t a great deal of photos from the trip what with me spending most of my battery on documenting the carnage on the way down [and subsequent amensia regarding parts of my camera charger]. Nevertheless there is a whole twenty two and a half minutes of Coach A splendour as a video.

What did we do? Managed to be surprisingly cultured to be honest. We hired bikes, went on a boat trip, went to the Anne Frank museum, went to the Heineken Experience [video link], saw the Red Light district, visited the Sex Museum, drank a reasonable quantity of the local brew, sat in late night bakeries, and indulged in a bit of Dansen bij Jansen. Not bad for two days work.

Big thanks to all the BA Econ people that made it happen: Claudio, Will, Joel, Dan and the rest of you. And thank you to Kate, Sam, Penelope and Emily for putting up with me and my collection of wires in their room for the weekend.

South East Asia Videos

Andy — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 14:22:00 +0000

I’ve just managed to upload all my videos from my trip this summer onto youtube and they areavailable on the video section of the website as well as at the andresworld youtube HQ. Thank goodness for uni’s high speed connection [200kb/s upload], otherwise I’d have been here all week.

Home Safely

Andy — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 12:51:00 +0000

Today Tim and I arrived safely back from South East Asia after our six weeks away and then a 17 hour flight home. I get back to Manchester on Sunday evening and will have the travel photos up soon after then but for the mean time you can view our route and all the photos at www.mylifeoftravel.com/andrewjackson.home.

South East Asia 2006

Andy — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:17:00 +0000

Righty. Tomorrow I fly to Bangkok to join every other Manchester Uni student and his overdraft for some asian jollyties in Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. I am going with my school friend Tim and we fly from Heathrow at 11am with Gulf Air and return by 15th September.

The rough plan is to get all our stuff in Bangkok and spend no more than two days in Thailand. We shall travel from Bangkok across the border to Siem Reap in Cambodia and see Ankor Wat for a few days. After which we will travel to the capital Phnom Penh and the coast. In Vietnam we’re going to wizz up the coast on the 1700km journey from Ho Chi Min City aka Saigon [queue Paul Hardcastle sample - nernernerner nineteen!] to Hanoi, possibly stopping at Nha Trang and Hoi An. From Hanoi we will travel into Nortern Laos for approx 12 days and take it easy in Luang prabang, Vang Vieng and other places I can’t spell.

You can track our progress on andresworld.co.uk on the travel section or alternatively on my travel blog on My Life Of Travel where there will be an interactive map and photos [with any luck].

Travel Galleries

Andy — Mon, 10 Jul 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Well this evening I’ve mainly been working on the travel section of the site. First off I decided to back up my travel blog which will now become redundant with the introduction of the my life of travel rss to html script which turns what I write on my life of travel into an updated page on the travel section. I’ve saved all the old blog and converted it to the new styleand copied it over to a new location on the revamp site. You can view the old blog under travel blog archive from the travel section. There’s a few interesting bits and bobs in there including my ramblings from last years eastern europe trip and a smattering of posts during the latter half of my gap year trip. Currently the links to the different months have been geared to when the site switches over, so if you do want to view any of the other past months before the switch then when you get the 404 just whack ‘/revamp’ in between andresworld.co.uk and /travel and you’ll get there.

Secondly I’ve transferred all my eastern europe trip photos over to the new gallery system. It was a little easier this time round than with my Gap Year photos as I knew what the problems would be straight off. Also the pics were just in one folder and not sorted by day as with my old camera. This meant I just started from scratch when creating folders for the countries and cities. I’ve decided to keep to the Trip -> Country -> City scheme of things just for continuity between the two travel galleries even though some countries only have one city or locations within them.

The blog section was completed last night as well and I posted a quick one about the world cup just to get the ball rolling [and to stop my 'now listening to' div straying across the side of the page]. Keep an eye on it, the plan is to keep this frontpage as merely an informative index to updates on the site and then insightful ramblings will take place on the blog, although I’m not going to post on this blog everytime i post on the blog. That would be just silly.