Travel Talk: Bahrain

How excited was I when I learned that one of my fellow classmates is an expat who grew up in Bahrain?! Very excited. So I took the chance to speak to Katy about cultural differences between the UK and Bahrain and exactly why you should visit the Pearl of the Gulf.

by Shabs_A

Follow Katy's blog for more info about Bahrain and tips on what to do when you get there.

The best travel experience

I have been lucky enough to visit some incredible places including India, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, to name but a few. My fascination with travel began at a young age, which is also one of my earliest memories as a child. I remember clear as day, walking onto a ferry aged 4, to cross the channel and visit family in Holland.

I remember being mesmerised by the water all around when my gran picked me up to look over the edge. Since then travelling has become an innate obsession. Although I've experienced some wonderful countries, my most treasured time abroad was last year on a three-week volunteer project to Marrakech.

I found myself browsing the photos from this trip on my Facebook profile today, so I thought I'd share some of those memories with you all. Check out the collages below, of my favourite pics that I took on the trip. All of them represent a memorable day or special moment!

From top left: Doors into Koutoubia Mosque, My first meal at Djemma El Fna square, Ouzoud Waterfalls, Me at the top of Ouzoud before our walk down, Me and Antony (another volunteer) at the boys orphanage, fishing boats in Essaouira.

From top left: Cabanas at Nikki Beach hotel where sex and the city 2 was filmed, Me standing on the fort ruins of Skala de la Ville in Essaouira, Oversized babouches, Me in front of the mighty Ouzoud Waterfalls, Stalls in Djemma el fna square selling dried fruit and nuts, Volunteering at a day care centre in a berber village, Koutoubia mosque minaret, Horse drawn carriage in Marrakech, Windy beach at Essaouira Bay, Beautiful intricate architecture at Palace Bahia.

Collages created on photovisi and collageIt

Find out more on volunteering in Morocco

Do vampires suck?

Like them or loathe them, vampires have become a TV phenomenon in recent times with most being gorgeous rather than grotesque. Unlike the mere mortals of the telly world, the zeitgeist dominating undead have a definitive allure of immortality, animalism and torment that modern day viewers find exciting. These vampiric traits have led a number of TV shows to huge success – moving well away from the days of Count Dracula.

The nocturnal neck nibblers have made a quick transition from literature to TV  and audiences have done nothing less than praise their dangerously seductive lifestyles.

As for the question of do vampires suck? - Yes – they do, a lot, for survival that is. However, the current generation of TV viewers find vampire antics obscurely inspiring for a story line – I’m one of those people and having watched various vamp motivated shows, I can safely say, vampires do NOT suck – only when they’re hungry!

Here are three of my fav vampire shows to hit our screens to date

An international cast dominates this vampire world -

Image courtesy of Claire Schmitt

True Blood

Sex and sin in the deep southern state of Louisiana. Charlaine Harris's books, Sookie Stackhouse/Southern Vampire Mysteries novels are brought to life by creator and producer Alan Ball, through a pleasurably escapist plot. Out-of-the coffin vampires trying their fangs at mainstreaming with werewolves, shape-shifters, witches, homosexual drug dealers, devil healers, double standard politicians and the protagonist - a telepathic waitress. It's raw and sultry with crude humour, spine-tingling horror and poisonous heartbreak. True Blood airs for its 5th season on HBO next summer.

The vampire TV reign started with Buffy in the 90s - 

Image courtesy of Phillipp Lenssen

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

For all the vampires she staked  there was always the perilously handsome Angel and devilishly hunky Spike. Seven seasons and thousands of super stunt kicks later, Sarah Michelle Gellar’s iconic character came to an end. For the time she and her band of sidekicks graced our TV screens we were introduced to demon hellmouths, high school drama, unforgivable curses, black magic, first love and in the case of her nerdy best friend Xander, unrequited affection. Buffy and her crew were your not-so-average everyday students, saving the world from unfathomable mysteries and a dangerous group of crimson tide connoisseurs, i.e. seriously dodgy vampires.

The Vampire Diaries

Dashing brother duo Stefan and Damon Salvatore (Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder) are relatively new to the TV vampire army. Their sharp teeth, perfect cheekbones and smoky predator eyes makes it hard not to watch the Vampire Diaries, based on the popular book series by L.J. Smith. Mystic Falls is their paranormal hometown of supernatural activity, again, with an abundance of mythical creatures like the vampire’s oldest enemy, werewolves. The brothers are on a continuous battle of good vs evil alongside fighting for the attention of a high school hottie – Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev) who also plays her feisty vampire doppelganger Katherine. The toxic love triangle and cliché question of will they won’t they works to the advantage of the show.

 If your not into vampires - watch it for the ridiculously

 good-looking cast - Image courtesy of Cristian Krause

Check out the official trailer for The Vampire Diaries episode titled 'Appetites', on the CW. From this 30 second clip it's easy to understand why the supernatural world of vampires is so enticing - obsession, seduction, temptation and pure escapism, what's not to love??! Enjoy!                                                                                                                    

Official episode trailer uploaded by the CW network's YouTube page

Michael Palin: Top 10 Travel Documentaries

President of the Royal Geographical Society and one sixth of the legendary comedy group, Monty Python, funny man Michael Palin is one of the most influential documentarians around. Having journeyed across the world, his travel programmes are widely recognised as phenomenons creating the 'Palin effect', as many areas he visits suddenly become popular tourist destinations. 

He has visited some of the world's most beautiful and most intriguing places. What I love about Palin is his curiosity when it comes to experiencing other cultures and his desire to learn more about the place he's in, from the people he meets, on his travels. He also has a great flair for travel writing and an informative yet completely entertaining nature in which he presents his extraordinary adventures to the viewers at home.

Here are my top 10 travel documentaries with Palin

1. Sahara with Palin - 2002
2. Michael Palin: Around the world in 80 days - 1989
3. Full Circle with Palin - 1997
4. Pole to Pole - 1992
5. Himalaya with Michael Palin - 2004
6. Michael Palin's New Europe - 2007
7. Confessions of a Trainspotter - 1980
8. Around the world in 20 years: 80 days revisited - 2008
9. Derry to Kerry - 1994
10. Michael Palin's Hemingway Adventure - 1999

One of my favourite stills taken from the number one on my list, showing a sunset on the way north through Algeria
  Photo by Basil Pao

More on Palin's travels 
Palin's time as a Python

Digital journalism tools

Every day I trawl through dozens of sites to get the latest news, travel tips and music reviews. For as long as I can remember, I have always noticed the little orange box in the corner of a web page yet steered well away from it with the firm belief that RSS feeds are too technical for my liking.

It turns out that I could be saving myself a lot time if I was brave enough to explore the mystery behind the little orange boxes. As our own digital guru, Andy Dickinson, a.k.a digidickinson, explains, RSS feeds are in fact simple to use and wonderfully convenient at saving you time. In a 3-hour digital journalism class he introduces us to Google Reader. It allows you to subscribe to numerous RSS feeds, i.e. the little orange boxes on a website, from where you must copy the RSS link and paste it into your Google Reader profile. This means that you now get all the information you want to receive in one place as Google Reader filters information from your favourite websites, updating you with the latest content from each, based on the order it is published.

What’s even more useful is that you can group your feeds into appropriate folders to optimise your browsing in one feed. For example, I have a ‘Travel News’ feed where I have subscribed via RSS to National Geographic Traveller and Guardian Travel. As my beat for my practical journalism module is environment, I also subscribed to the environment sections of the BBC and Preston’s local paper, the Lancashire Evening Post. The feeds from these sites are grouped under ‘Environment News’. So now, instead of visiting dozens of websites, I just log into Google Reader and the content from my subscriptions is there, ready for me to browse and read, and even star articles that I wish to come back to later. I’ll be clicking the little orange boxes more, now that I have discovered Google Reader.

Diagram shows how RSS serves as the mechanism for syndication and aggregation of RSS-enabled Web content - meaning that RSS feeds are useful for online users and beneficial to publishers too. 

Illustration by Jason Rhodes

Digidickinson then moved onto Delicious. The basis of this site is to collect links that you find worth sharing. The site offers elements of social networking whereby users are able to search, view and share each other’s lists of links. These lists can include the most unusual content such as ‘Zombie Apocalypse Survival Guide’ to more special interest links such as ‘Mosaic Sculpture Gardens’. Once more, this site is a useful time saver. You can search any topic and a pre-made list of links will present itself to you. Furthermore, if the links are on Delicious, then no doubt, an online user thought they were worth sharing and could prove more useful than 750 pages of Google or Bing results.

Then, we go onto Trunk.ly, a social bookmarking tool that fulfills the users needs for ‘data curation’. Its homepage reads –‘…the easiest way to save links online’ – and that is exactly what it is. Great for storing links to things on the web you may want to return to later – and especially great – because you can access these links from any computer, unlike a bookmark, which is specifically saved to your own laptop. Trunk.ly also remembers any links that you share on your online platforms, whether that be on Twitter, Facebook, your blog or even Google Reader. All your links are stored here so you don’t have to trawl through your internet history to find them again. 

Enter Twitterfeed – an online (re)distribution tool that acts as a self promotion platform. Twitterfeed will automatically tweet new posts that you publish onto your blog. So, once I’ve written this, my humble following of 600+ tweeps will see a link to this very post on their timeline. The most exciting online platform that our digital mastermind introduced us to, is something he uses to inform his students of his whereabouts – incase they struggle to cope with him not being in his office. He does this through ifttt (if this then that). The site automates feeds based on trigger events. These commands can trigger by dates and times and link to other social network platforms. For example, digidickinson will create a trigger that on Thursday afternoons between 12-3, his twitter page @wheresandy will post a tweet that reads, ‘I’m teaching postgrads til 3pm’. Obviously, very useful for the long queue of undergrads waiting to see him!