Sail­ing up the Ljubljan­ica

When I was in Ljubljana this summer, I went on a boat tour up the Ljubljan­ica river that runs through the city.

Published
Categorised as Slovenia

All Neon Like

Here’s a selec­tion of instagram photos I took in Tokyo. I felt I was giving it short shrift only having one post with a few photos. You can see more in the Japan category, and also read about the trip in the zine I wrote.

Tokyo

I took a lot of photos in Japan, and it’s taken me a while to sort through them. I’ll be spread­ing out the posts over this week to avoid having one giant pile of photos at once. I wrote a zine (avail­able here) about the trip to Japan as well, so I’ll save blog posts for the pictures (which you will be able to find under the Japan category).

These are from Tokyo. I didn’t actu­ally take that many DSLR photos in Tokyo, mostly film and phone photos. You can see the phone pictures on my Instagram account, with all of the neon skyscrapers you’d expect from Tokyo. The gate above is in Taito, an area further out of town where we stayed.

Gute Reise

On Thursday I go off to spend 6 weeks in Cent­ral Europe. One week in Brno in the Czech Repub­lic, then five weeks in vari­ous places in Austria teach­ing. Then in March, I’m off to Japan for two weeks.

So I will clos­ing the shop from 3pm GMT on Weds the 18th of Jan. If you want zines or ribbons or badges, this is your last chance until April.

I’m going to Japan

This March I’m going to Japan for two weeks with my friend Vicky (also of Pen Fight zine distro), co-incid­ing with her 30th birth­day.

A little while ago, I won a compet­i­tion I’d entered at a food fair run by Japan Centre food halls.The top prize was two flights to Osaka cour­tesy of Air France KLM, five nights stay at the Hyatt hotel in Kyoto (way, way out of my normal budget), and a free tour of the Gekkeik­an Sake Brew­ery. The runners up got free sake. I’ve entered this kind of compet­i­tion before, but only ever won the free booze at best, so I was aston­ished to hear that I was the winner, and didn’t quite believe it was real until the whole trip was firmly booked yester­day. So a big thank you to Kim at Japan Centre (and also for the deli­cious free lunch at the company’s restaur­ant when I collec­ted the prize).

Published
Categorised as Japan, Travel

Fanzine Ynfytyn 26

This one is about the exper­i­ence of grow­ing up holi­day­ing in a cara­van at French camp­sites. A typic­al holi­day for Brit­ish people, but prob­ably weird and exot­ic for those from further away. Avail­able for £2 from my shop (includes UK post­age- inter­na­tion­al extra)

Published
Categorised as Zines

Low stress travel on the cheap

I love to travel, but I don’t have much money. Although long-haul flights and luxury holi­days are out of my reach at the moment I’ve managed to see a fair bit of the world for not very much, and perhaps my budget limit­a­tions have meant that I’ve seen some inter­est­ing places I might have other­wise missed out on.

I find online budget travel tips not that great though. They seem to swing from “save money by only eating ityer­eal bars and sleep­ing on trains on your trip” to “cram in thirty museums in one day with this special tick­et” to “get this special Air Miles cred­it card only avail­able in Flor­ida, and book your flights at 3am on Thursdays Alaska time”. I want to eat nice food from the cuisine of the coun­try in ques­tion; sleep in a clean, safe and comfort­able hotel room in a conveni­ent loca­tion; and get a chance to explore and see things prop­erly, not treat­ing sights like a tick list to complete as quickly as possible. I don’t want to be cold, hungry, exhausted, or put myself in danger; this is supposed to be fun. I just don’t have a lot of money to spend.

Mont St Michel

I went to Mont St Michel last week for the first time in years. It’s a medi­ev­al abbey on an island on the border between Normandy and Brit­tany, about an hour’s drive from my mum’s house in France. We went there a few times when I was a kid, and the last time I was there was in the late 90s on a school trip. It has dramat­ic­ally changed since then.

There was some­thing a bit seedy and cynic­al about the place in the 90s despite the spec­tac­u­lar town itself. Buses and cars drove over the cause­way to the island, and parked in a decrep­it carpark on the shore, which had a tend­ency to flood. As you made your way up through the snak­ing medi­ev­al street to the abbey at the top of the peak, there were endless shops selling cheap replica hunt­ing knives, saucy post­cards and boxes of fire­crack­ers. It must have been a night­mare for teach­ers super­vising school groups.

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