ONE FIT MUCKER!!

Guess what? I have set up a new blog by the brilliant name of ONE FIT MUCKER. Don’t worry…I’ll still be posting about my travels here, but posts about my new mission to get fit and have fun doing it will be posted on my new blog with lots of great photographs from each event.

The challenge : To participate in as many wild and wacky adventures before the end of 2013, with the goal of having as much fun as possible while increasing levels of fitness at the same time.

This will not be your average fitness blog.

This is not about running. Not about marathons. Not simpply about getting fit. It’s about getting down and dirty on crazy adventure courses, spending more time outdoors rather than in the pub (although there might be a bit of that too!) and strengthening friendships through day time excursions rather than night time sessions!

By the end of the year I’m going to be… ONE FIT MUCKER!! Check it out now.

Versatile Blogger Award – Better late than never!

So a few weeks ago I got nominated for a “Versatile Blogger Award” by “The Boy” over at Short and Fun blog…go check it out!! I feel pretty bad about not doing what I was supposed to straight away so I’m going to try to make up for it now! So first off let me say thanks for nominating me and if anyone is looking for  some cool, short and fun posts go check out Short and Fun Blog, it’s highly entertaining!

So what now? Oh yes I have to nominate 15 bloggers (but I’m breaking the rules again and I;m only nominating 10!) who I think are equally awesome and deserve a bit of praise. This is going to be tricky as I follow so many great blogs…but here goes…

1. LRNT Blog Go check out this absolutely beautiful photography blog by the wonderful Lauren. Her photos are so colorful and alive…she really makes me want to visit all the places she had captured, a blog in need of much praise! She has the ability to make us appreciate the tiniest things in life and make them beautiful- an inspiration.

2.Ecstatic Eclectica Go check out Russels beautiful photographs where, in his own words, “Beauty is everywhere just waiting to be captured”. So true and he illustrates this brilliantly by taking daily photos of what some might see as mundane and makes you see the interesting side of everything.

3. 50 Year Challenge How can you not love a blog about visiting 192 countries, reading 1,001 books, and watching the top 100 movies over 50 years! Go check out her post about encountering a Lion in the wild..scary stuff!

4. Carl Dagostino Carl’s tagline on his blog is, “I know I made you smile”, and no truer words could be said of this hilarious cartoonist…go check out his blog, it will put a smile on your face too!

5. Heifer 12×12 Go check out the wonderful Betty’s mission to go to 12 countries in 12 months and REALLY get to know the places she goes and the people she meets. Interesting stories, beautiful photographs and a charming lady!!

6. Rasta Photographer I’m having great fun following this blog about Ethiopian adventures and using it to re-live my own adventures on magical continent that is Africa.

7.Wells For Zoe A blog about a project of the same name set up to provide clean and safe water for rural communities in Malawi. I think these guys are really inspirational plus they’re Irish so that’s a major bonus!!

8.Studio Michael James From photos of Mickey Mouse to tropical beaches, wild safari plains and waterfalls to mouth watering bottles of wine…his pictures are all fantastic and I love checking in on this blog daily to see what’s new!

9. Chiquero These guys are mesmerizing! If you want bright, jump-off-the-page, colorful, cheerful, interesting, unbelievable, unusual and every other adjective available to describe unique photographs and art projects…go check out this blog!

10. The Unperceived Heidi over at The Unperceived is an artist specializing in Photography…but you don’t need to be a genius to figure that out. Go check out her blog, this girl has real talent!

Lastly I believe I’m suppose to tell you all 7 random facts about myself. Here goes…

 

1. My favourite song in the whole wide world is “Galway Girl”, by Mundy.

2. I have been a member of couchsurfing for nearly 5 years now and still love it as much as my first ever couchsurfing experience.

3. I’m 5 foot 10 inches tall (or 176 cm!) and have big feet (size 7-8) for a  girl but I still LOVE wearing high heels!

4. I celebrated the millenium twice.

5. Naweza kusema swahili kidogo! (That’s swahili, can you guess what it says?!)

6. I love making up new cheesy chat up lines! “Are you from Jamaica? Cause Jamaking me craaaaazzzzy!”

7. My middle name is Katrina, so my initials are “J.k Newenham”..oh so similar to “J.k Rowling”. She’s a little older than me though!

Happy blogging everyone!

I think you should….

…Start reading the blogs in my blogroll! I’m quite picky with what I put there so the ones that are listed are true gems. They are blogs I like to look at on a daily basis, so if you find no new posts here, maybe you should go check them out! They will make you laugh, make you cry or maybe even inspire you!

A few of my favorites include the below but everything in  my blogroll is worth reading! 

Blink and You’ll Miss the very cute, adorable blog written by my friend Kelly from college. Bored at work? Feeling a little down? Go check out her blog and all those cute pictures and enviable fashion pics will surely put a smile on your face! Its got over 450 THOUSAND views so she’s deffo doing something right!

Travel With Papino is another of my favorites. Check out and laugh at her Top 10 travel confessions or simply browse through all her wonderful travel photo features. You can submit your own photos too which is pretty awesome… I sent some along to for her Jumping feature as boy do I love jumping shots!

Reasonably Ludicrous is a new kid on the block. Russ is his name and comedy is his game. Seriously this guy has a major gift for story telling and if he doesn’t have you giggling with lines like,(He had…) “ arms the size of porpoises, and a smile that could cure cancer..” I’ll eat my shorts. CHECK HIM OUT NOW!!!

Crabby Old Fart is a blog written  by some grumpy old grandpa with a fiercely offensive mouth and a hatred for the youth of today. All in good nature I’m sure, this guy cracks me. He’s constant complaints about the way we dress, the things we say, that we can’t drive, we listen to crap music, we have tattoos and are all high on drugs…but he writes it all in such a comical way you can’t help but love the crabby old fart!

Raising Miro is the complete opposite of the crabby old fart. It’s a blog written my mother and (12 yr old) son travelling the world. It talks of how amazing family is, how mothers and young people alike don’t always have to conform to the norm. It’s a truly inspirational blog with great stories from around the world.

Other blogs to check out include Par-al-lel-e-vi-sion is you love TV or script writing, Fluent in 3 Months if you want to learn a language and fast(!!) Also check out the great travel blog Bacon is Magic…why? Because everyone loves a bit of Bacon! Oh and if you want to work on a cruise ship or your love couchsurfing or enjoy comedy and hilarious Microsoft paint drawings..check out Cruisesurfingz!! Roy is the best, every one of his blog posts is either informative or HIGHLY entertaining!!

 

Time for a career change

Lending a hand to those who need it

So as many of you know, and perhaps many of you DON’T know, I have recently been offered (and as of today, have ACCEPTED!) a place on the MSc in Humanitarian Action in University College Dublin starting in September!

This excites me A LOT and means 2 big changes will be happening over the next few months.

Number 1: This blog will probably get a make-over. Journalist on THE RUN, won’t  be doing too much running! “Journalist in the library” might become more accurate!

While I promise I will still post regularly it may change from travel orientated posts to my observations about everyday life; fun, upcoming events and maybe posts related to the course I will be studying! Stay with me beloved readers, I’m sure I will have just as many adventures back in Dublin as I have had travelling the world over the last few years!

Number 2: My career will be getting a make-over. Note I say “career” in the loosest meaning of the word! At the moment, it would appear I am a “teacher”. That is what I do for 5 days and 40 hours a week. Then again given that little scrap of paper I think we call a degree, I am officially a “Journalist”. If you are reading this right now (Oh, hello there..cuppa tea?) then you may see me as a “blogger”.

Well, as of september 2011, I will be working towards my next career change; to become a qualified Humanitarian Aid worker, something I have DREAMED about for years. It’s an amazing course that allows me to study something I have always been passionate about while still getting feeding my other passion, Travel! With an induction period in the University of Warsaw in Poland, semester 1 in Dublin then semester 2 in either Sweden, Germany or Holland and even a chance to go to one of 6 (mainly developing) countries for semester 3. It sounds pretty awesome, right?

WISH ME LUCK, THE REST OF MY LIFE STARTS HERE!

Bye Bye Bad Blogs

Too much Soju...

Blackout Korea; This site displays photos of people passed out in public all over Korea. Too much soju, too much cass. Too far from home. This site has been featured on many other sites, some newspapers and magazines and appears to have caused a lot of controversy in the last year. It has now been made private on blogspot, so that only 100 people can access the posts. However all the photos are still floating about online. I guess, like the famous quote from The Social Network movie, “The internet isn’t written in pencil… it’s written in ink”. Those photos are here to stay.

English Teachers Out; I was going to write about this site after hearing that they were using pictures from Blackout Korea and comparing them to photos of Abu Gharib, somehow comparing the foreigners (who took these drunken photos) to Prison authorities in Afghanistan who captured, abused and tortured people. But as it appears the site has recently been shut down, I will say no more.

Texts from Korean Girls; Considering how much I love the hilarious site “Texts from Last Night“, I decided to check this one out. However apart from maybe a few giggles, it is actually pretty awful and I guess pretty racist. I mean OF COURSE their English is bad…can you imagine if we, as english speakers, tried to text people in Korean…Disaster.com! In fact I decided to try this out on google translate to see just how disastrous it would be…

Example of a txt from the site, ““I will make you eat kimchi and sex”

Here is what she may have wanted to say, “I will make you Kimchi and we can have sex”

Korean (thanks google translate) “내가 김치를 공급하고 우리가 섹스를 할 수”

Then back to English(google translate)… “I have sex with kimchi and we can supply”.

So….yeah it could have been worse! the good news is this site has not been updated in over 5 months so I guess even the founder realised what he was writing about was in bad taste.

There are SO many wonderful blogs that you SHOULD check out, but are there any blogs that you feel are just plain AWFUL??

2010 My Blog in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 23,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 5 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 99 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 112 posts. There were 578 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 87mb. That’s about 2 pictures per day.

The busiest day of the year was October 25th with 396 views. The most popular post that day was 101 Books to Read before you die..

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were blogsurfer.us, facebook.com, koreanbloglist.com, 20sb.net, and en.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for chickens, scottish flag, korean food, don’t worry be happy, and skydive.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

101 Books to Read before you die. October 2010
4 comments

2

Let’s Learn about Dangerous Chickens! August 2010
9 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

3

Scotland isn’t a REAL country. August 2010
6 comments

4

Where in the World August 2008
10 comments

5

The Love Shack…Yeahhh! August 2010
3 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

How do you measure, measure a year?!

The ‘I love your blog’ interview

Right, so this cool little interview task is doing its rounds on the blogospher at the moment and I have been nominated by the always lovely, always smiling Suddenly Susan to try it out. Hopefully you will enjoy reading and it might give you a little more info about me.

Why Did you Create your blog?

This blog was actually set up as part of an online Journalism module while I was at Uni. The funny (sad really) reality is I hated the idea of been made to blog daily so much that I refused to do it and actually……FAILED the module and had to repeat it during the summer. Nightmare. Oh how things have changed. I ressurected it about 3 months ago and now can’t get enough of my bloggy wog.  The main difference is I can now write about my travel adventures instead of boring online journalism educational rubbish. HAPPY DAYS!

What kind of blogs do you follow?

I follow a wide range of blogs. From the always quirky ‘A Chick Named Hermia’ to my mates blogs about fashion, music and life. At the moment, however, most of the blogs I follow are written by fellow foreigners here in the land of the morning calm and revolve around life in Korea and it’s ups and downs. I also love reading travel blogs, when I have the time.

Favourite make-up brand

I’m not big into make up so don’t have a favourite brand. I have never really been a girly girl so would rather spend my money on cheap Ryanair flights to latvia than on a super expensive bottle of liquid magic foundation or whatever they call it! I normally stick to Rimmel unless I can raid my mums makeup bag..that has lots of lovely Clarins goodies.

Your favourite colour

No idea. I love wearing red lipstickk and at the moment I’m wearing lots of  black, which is fairly depressing so I would have to say….SKY BLUE or Pink or Purple during the winter! Yes I do love bright colours so I do!

Your Perfume

I have been wearing Sarah Jessica Parker ‘Lovely’ for a few years ever since my friend Jeni bought it for my birthday one year. I also love Lancome ‘Miracle’ and YSL ‘Baby Doll Paris’. Lots of sweet and lovely girly smells despite me not been a girly girl, I know! the perfume I’m saving up for/would ABSOLUTELY love ir Victor Rolf ‘Flower Bomb’..Mmmm

Your Favourite Film

Constant Gardener hands down. I ca’t get enough of that movie and really feel I can relate to it as many of the scenes were shot in a village where two friends and I spent a summer teaching English, in the far remote desert of northern Kenya. I also love Shall We Dance with Richard Gere and J-Lo and Amlost Famous…such awesome music!

What country would you like to visit and why?

This is a seriously difficuly question. So I ‘m going to adjust it slightly from ‘country’ to ‘continent’ and say ANTARCTICA! It’s been my dream to go here after interviewing Jonathon Shackleton about his polar explorarion. Seems like one of the most natural, ae inspiring and spectacualr places on the planet. Failing this I guess…Alaska would be cool too.

Write a question yourself and answer it: What are your plans for this weekend?

I’m going Ski-ing in the Korean mountains and am UBER excited. Have not been for years so hope I don’t fall over and  make a complete ass of myself, but that will be a story for another post!!

Hey you! You’re next…

From Korea with love

Ahn nyeong ha se ya

TourAbsurd

In a dark, dimly lit room…

…is where I write deepest, darkest secrets. A room full of cries, of pain, screams and flashing, and off putting ultra violet lights.

Ahhh the delights of a Korean Internet Cafe!!!

You may read my blog and think, “Geez this girl is over in Korea teaching English yet her blog has endless typos and spelling mistakes. PLUS she ‘supposedly’ has a degree in Journalism. What’s the story?!

Here is the story… I write my blog posts circa 2am each night in a local PC Bang. As my apartment block is brand new I do not have internet yet…add that to the fact that my precious laptop was robbed last year, I really don’t have much choice.

PC Bang, Korea

A Korean PC bang is primarily designed for playing computer games and not for writing blog posts. They are very dimly lit, dark places with the occasional flashing neon or ultra violet lights and very loud machine gun and ‘dying predators’ sound effects. Not exactly the best place to gather my thoughts and write an informed blog post but alas I have little choice at present! So bear with me people.

I do promise to try my best to read over posts before posting in future…but in a room where I can’t see the keyboard and the lights give me migraines in can be fustrating!