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Swahili Rhythm

Monday 26th April 2010

Swahili wedding celebrations are wonderful occasions.  During my stay on Wasini, a small island off the Southeast coast of Kenya, I had the opportunity to take part in the womens’ festivities that occur prior to a traditional Muslim marriage ceremony. 


 

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This is Kiev?

Monday 26th April 2010

“This? This is Kiev?” I asked the conductor on the twenty-hour Poland to Ukraine train in the simplest English possible. He replied back in a heavily accented English, “Yes! Yes! This Kiev!”


 

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Always Bring a Sandwich


Monday 22nd March 2010

When you live in a country it’s common not to take advantage of the historical and cultural pursuits on offer, as weekdays are dominated by work and weekends are wiled away drinking tequila and dancing Salsa badly in the local square.


 

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Profile: Washington DC

Monday 22nd March 2010

First time visitors to the United States often pass over the wonders of the nation's capital and chose to instead experience the brilliant high rises of New York City or Florida's tropical escapes


 

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City Profile: Bordeaux

Monday 22nd March 2010

When you first arrive in Bordeaux, you’ll feel as though you’ve fallen, Tron style, into an architect’s blue print without the cool motorbikes.


 

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Celine

Monday 22nd March 2010

Cities aren’t like onions: they’re artichokes. Onions peel away to nothing. Artichokes reveal a hairy, hard to access core, successive layers peeling away like the snail-shell spiral of the Parisian arrondissiments. I think artichokes are a little like Paris.


 

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Around the World with a camera


 

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Photo Flikr annia316
A Weekend in Venice

Monday 7th December 2009

Venezia is a picturesque and utterly unique town in Northern Italy that is a tourist’s dream. However, seen from a local perspective it becomes much, much more.



 

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Photo: Supplied
The Isle of Skye

Monday 7th December 2009

I think of Skye in its colors.  In the spritely greens of the moss that cushions much of the landscape and the harsher, more sandpapery green of grass tufting the hillsides.


 

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Escaping the Bubble

Monday 7th December 2009

We all talk about escaping the confines of the bubble, but how many of us actually manage it? St. Andrews doesn’t have a railway station let alone an airport, but is it really as much trouble as it initially seems to get up and break away for a weekend, or perhaps longer?


 

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There and Back Again, an Euro-Rail Tale

Monday 7th December 2009

First off, if you have ever considered going travelling, even just for the briefest second, along the lines of “I need to go to Tesco, write up my lecture notes, and I wonder what it would be like to go to Bulgaria”, then I would recommend you go for it. 


 

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Photo: Supplied
Seeing the Berlin Wall Fall

Monday 7th December 2009




 

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Copyright S K Reid Photography'
City Profile: St Andrews

Monday 23rd November 2009

If Adam and Eve, on their solitary exile from Paradise, had stumbled across St Andrews they would have been able to stick two fingers up to God having found a new and better one (disregarding the weather). 



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Credit Crunch Travelling

Monday 23rd November 2009


Students have been known to travel to the most bizarre places often using exceedingly intricate routes to get there – and this all for a number of very good reasons


 

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City Profile: Budapest

Monday 2nd November 2009

Both geographically and culturally, Budapest is the angry, rapid-beating heart of Hungary; a country which has for all intents and purposes embraced its old enemy capitalism.  Huge, dirty and busy it has all the Orientalist qualities of an Asian city, being at once familiar and exotic.


 

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Massacre at Srebrenica

Monday 2nd November 2009


It is not the sole act of travelling that helps a person grow in knowledge and culture. It is the entirety of travelling that may have that effect on us; it is the collaboration of body, spirit, mind and memory, which can help truly take us somewhere; even back in time.


 

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Copyright S K Reid Photography'
Musings About Moving to Scotland

Monday 2nd November 2009

In three weeks I am moving to Scotland. While all of my peers are driving to private colleges and state universities, I’m still at home, preparing to leave the country.


 

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The Politics of Travel

Monday 2nd November 2009


Picture the classic scene: a sweaty mass of beer soaked, L-plate sporting, sunburnt and beer gutted bodies swarming a vomit soaked post-football match read



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City Profile: Lourdes

Monday 2nd November 2009

If pilgrimage was the conceiver of travel, then Lourdes is its immaculate conception; though just how immaculate is a question that leaves little to the imagination. read



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The Problem of Travel Writing

Monday 19th October 2009

Language is a colonizer.  To speak and read and write are impositions of language onto both the agent and the subject.  If ‘Colonization is at the origin: [and] we are always already dependants of language’, is it possible to express anything without colonial force and motivation;


 

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Travelling on a budget

Monday 19th October 2009

You get the signal to enter the hall after anxiously waiting outside. You scope out your seat quickly, there is a sense of urgency in the way you behave, nervously writing down your name on the paper you await the signal from the coordinator.



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Ultimate Travel Playlist

Monday 19th October 2009

The ten best tracks to take with you


 

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Year Abroad: Germany
 
Monday 28th September 2009

I am walking through the corridors of a vast 18th century German palace, surrounded by another thirty or so, mostly female, students who all look as terrified and as dazed as I feel.


 

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City Profile: Rotterdam

Monday 28th September 2009

Just 45 minutes from its eurotrashy counterpart, Rotterdam lies, or rather poses coolly on the banks of the Nieuwe Maas dressed in the kind of colourful, dynamic architecture you might find in H&M if they sold buildings.


 

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The Pros and Cons of a Gap Year

Monday 28th September 2009

I wish I was currently sitting in a hammock, under equatorial sun, sipping a cuba libre and listening to Bob Marley. Nearly two years ago I would have been doing exactly that. I travelled Ecuador for two months, having a month on the Galapagos Islands.



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Becoming Poirot: Interail

Monday 28th September 2009

Unfortunately, my little grey cells were allowed to remain idle since I didn’t happen by strange coincidence to witness any murders on even one of the eight trains that took me and two friends on a whirlwind loop of, in map-speak, just a little patch of Europe.