Travel towels

A great many of us often have trouble packing. There's no shame in liking our creature comforts - we like having absolutely everything on us, all our body lotions and shampoos, and a whole host of gadgetry.

Goodness knows, I'm guilting of taking all the tech I own with me when I travel - my MacBook Air, iPad, iPhone, Canon 550D, and Kindle. (In my defence, I need to blog - so tech is non-negotiable.)

Because I often fly with budget airlines, I don't check in anything - which means that everything I take with me needs to fit in my RyanAir-sized carry-on bag. As of right now, I have been travelling for nearly a month with just my carry-on! I try to save on space in my bag wherever possible, and here is my secret to saving a lot of it: travel towels.

Travel towels are very different from your normal fluffy big towels. They're made of a super-absorbent microfibre material, which means they work just like your regular towels but take up a sixth of the space.



Although you won't get the huge fluffiness of usual towels, travel towels are absolutely perfect - they fold up so small that they barely take up any space at all, and they have the same absorbance capacity as usual towels, so it isn't difficult to use them at all!

Of course, not to forget this most important of quotes about towels:

“A towel, [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.”

So that's my travel secret for keeping my bag packed light. What's yours?

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Photo Friday: Keeping time in Greenwich, London, England

Greenwich in London is best known for being home to the Prime Meridian, or the absolute centre of time. Well, when I mean time, I really mean that if you've ever heard of Greenwich Meridian Time or GMT, this is where GMT +/- 0 is.

Greenwich is also home to some really nice grassy places that make for awesome picnics in bright, sunny weather.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="600"] Loving these hair chains for summer![/caption]



Before getting to the Meridian proper, there's a museum on the history of clocks and timekeeping.



Also some pretty nice views over Greenwich and London.



Did you know that the phrase "on the ball" comes from this time ball?

The time ball on Greenwich could be seen from the river Thames, and would be raised to halfway up at five minutes to the hour and all the way up at two minutes to the hour - and back in the day, this is how ships got accurate time! The earliest pendulum swing clocks didn't work out at sea due to the rocking motion of the boats.





After walking through the whole museum we found the Meridian Line, which is built into the floor and shows the longitude of various countries around the world!





[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] I found Singapore![/caption]



There's also a functional dolphin-tail sundial that tells you the time by the shadow that's cast.

(I checked the time on the sundial against that on my phone. It was impressively accurate.)





I went to the Royal Observatory and planetarium.





Here is a fragment of the Gibeon meteorite which is probably the oldest thing on this planet - it's a crazy 4.5 billion years old!



Inside the planetarium, while waiting for the show to start we saw some pretty lights dance around the rim. It reminded me a little of the aurora.

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Listen to Tuesday: London's West End

When in London, one of my favourite things to do is to go to the theatre and listen to music. Live shows - musicals most of all, but also operas, concerts of every kind, and those are things which London has in abundance.

Around every corner in London are advertisements for the latest new show that's opening on the West End, or for concerts that are happening this weekend.



For all of £5, under-25s can catch Tim Minchin's musical adaptation of Roald Dahl's Matilda. 16 student rush tickets are set aside each show and sold the morning-of, and queues for tickets begin from 7AM when the box office opens at 10AM.

Naturally, I was one of the crazy ones who stood for 1.5h in the cold London morning to snag cheap tickets!





The kids in Matilda are nothing short of impressive - it's easy for a lot of things to go wrong when a cast is comprised largely of tweens, but these kids have powerful singing voices and dancing shoes to match! Despite complicated music and routines, these kids nail them every time.

The impressive talent of children was most certainly the star of this show.



I also had the chance to watch Singin' in the Rain before it closed on the West End. The title song even included real water coming from the top of the stage - and for once I was glad not to be sitting in the first few rows of the theatre, when water was being splashed onto those at the front!





Tell me - what are your favourite shows playing on the West End?

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Goodbye, Scotland

I lived the past year of my life in Scotland. And it's a strange feeling to know that it's going to be a while before we meet again.

It didn't take very long of my living in Edinburgh to start seeing the place as 'home' - this, despite grey clouds that never seem to go away, everyone constantly reminding me that "Scotland is a cold, cold place," and the masses of drunken people that never failed to be screaming and shouting outside my window on Cowgate at 3AM in the morning.

If anything, I think those were the things that made me love Scotland all the more - the grit and the grime, the unpolished imperfection of it all.

Despite having been to nine countries in as many months, there's something that's satisfying about stepping off a plane at Edinburgh airport - knowing that at the end of a trip, no matter what I'll be coming home.

Scotland has never seen herself as a glittering jewel of anything. Scotland is raw, pure, and her people are free.

It is this rawness of the country which I have come to love - the highlands with miles of road ahead, having to wait for sheep and highland coos to cross the road, the dark, peaceful nights in Galloway and on the Isle of Skye, so dark that it's completely black outside your window except for stars shining in the sky above.

I have come to love Edinburgh (although true Scots will say that Edinburgh is more like England than it is Scotland) for the Royal Mile, where I used to work, doing leafletting and getting to become good friends with other people who did busking on the streets. I love that Edinburgh is so small, that we almost never use public transport at all - our own two feet are good enough for just about anything.

I love Glasgow for walking down the streets of the heart of Scotland and listening to thick Scottish accents, sometimes so thick that you really have to pay attention to understand what they're trying to say.

People are friendly - you can start a conversation with just about anyone.

Scotland has her curiosities. Haggis, for one. Saying 'wee' every other word. The amazing, amazing social festivity known as the ceilidh, where people dance with perfect strangers and have a helluva good time.

The last week of living at Kincaid's, a bunch of my flatmates and I were sitting in the common room at 2AM, talking about everything that we would miss about this incredible time living here. We started listening to Loch Lomond, and before we knew it we were close to tears.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uZ-p-tN8Gs

I guess at this point this has just turned into long-winded rambling and nostalgic reminiscence of everything that is Scottish. So what I'm really trying to say is:

Scotland, I miss you already, and I can't wait until the next time I get to go home.

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Photo Friday: It's almost summer in Edinburgh, Scotland

Sunny days in Scotland are few and far between, so when they happen everyone is out to enjoy them.

Unless your name is Som (watch that name folks, she's a rising fashion designer) in which case you prefer covering your head with a purple scarf while you're lying in the bright Scottish sunshine.

My flatmates and I decided to head to the Meadows for a picnic, together with the rest of Edinburgh which seemed out to be full force with frisbees, picnic mats and portable barbecues.

Here is the portrait of half-a-flat (because everyone had gone home, boo), in the last days of our living at Kincaid's Court.







We took with us whipped cream and scones, cheese, doughnuts, orange juice, and had a great time rolling around in the lush green grass.















Som's whipped cream and scones were absolutely delicious - I could have had five of them in a row, they were that good. She even whipped the cream herself by using double cream and an electric mixer. Mad skills.



Even the cherry blossom tree was in full bloom.







[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="700"] Savannah and me![/caption]

Joan seemed to be especially enjoying the sunlight.









I too like the sunlight, especially in Scotland when we barely have any.

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