Over the course of many conversations with sixth form students, I realised that one of the things deterring them from taking a Gap Year was starting university a year late. For a lot of the people I spoke to, many were adamant that they were going to start the year with peers of their own […]
One Year Ago: Reflections | Gap Year Travel
On Wednesday, I woke up and opened the Facebook app on my phone. I was presented with a screen which said ‘One Year Ago’ and the following picture from my Gap Year: View this post on Instagram A post shared by V I O L A (@violahelen_) Wednesday marked exactly 365 days since I landed […]
The Greyhound Hop-on Hop-off Pass | Australia’s East Coast
A lot of people have asked me how I got around in Australia and this post is dedicated to telling you 🙂 What did we get? Alice and I both opted for the Greyhound Sydney-Cairns Hop-on Hop-off pass which (I think?) was priced at $425 AUD at the time but I know we paid £213. […]
Sailing the Whitsundays with New Horizon
Today I’ll be taking you back to my time in Australia over Dec-Feb… After our Fraser Island Tour and homeless night in Hervey Bay, Alice and I had the Whitsundays next up on our backpacker itinerary. We had gone almost seven weeks without using any travel agency or company to help book our activities (there are pros […]
Gap Year Reflections
Some of you may have seen my instagram post on Tuesday evening: After 7 months, 4 countries, 3 continents, 23 cities, 6 islands, 11 flights, 4 SIM cards, 1 homeless night, 2 Chinese visas, 1 unexpected trip to Edinburgh, 154 hours of Mandarin lessons, over 100kg of rice eaten, 3 home-stay families, 700+ Chinese students, […]
If We Were Having Coffee… | Vol. 7
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I’m currently sat on my flight back home to London. After 7 months of being away, it’s finally time to return home and end my gap year adventures. I really don’t want to come home (no, seriously) but there are a few things I will be looking […]
If We Were Having Coffee… | Vol. 6
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I’ve actually moved out of the homestay I previously mentioned. The mother was actually really troublesome and we ended up clashing and having several problems. One of those problems being that the mother didn’t do anything at all when her daughter almost broke my Macbook – not […]
The Volunteer Series: TEFL in Photos | Chengdu
For the past two months I’ve been volunteering as an English teacher in Chengdu, China. I taught sixteen classes a week: 10 junior (year 8) and 6 senior (year 11). As part of my volunteer series, I’ve put together a post of my past two months in photos. Included are: some bits of my two-day […]
If We Were Having Coffee… | Vol. 4
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that I have spent waaay too much time on YouTube this week watching TED Talks and random other videos. Watching so many inspired me to finally get down to editing some of my gap year footage {I vlogged my entire time in Australia and Bali}. So I’ve spent […]
If We Were Having Coffee… | Vol. 3
If we were having coffee, I would tell you that this week we had lunch with the school’s headmaster. We were driven to a restaurant about twenty minutes away from the school in the mountains where we feasted on the local cuisine. The Chinese like to toast a lot so we were constantly clinking glasses […]