Monday 24 July 2017

Weekly Summary Post: 3rd Week Of July

Hey guys it's that time of the week again where I share what you may have missed on my youtube channel this week.

5 Comedy Sketches You Need To Watch

Who loves a good ol' bit of stand-up comedy? I certainly do and I wanted to share my all time favourite sketches because I think it would be a shame if people didn't know about them!

Summer Glow Makeup Look

The second video I posted this week is a Glowy Summer look because you guys probably know I have a highlighter addiction. If it were up to me, I'd wear highlighter and shimmery products all over my face.

Thank you very much for watching/reading. The song of the day is New Rules by Dua Lipa. I hope you all have a lovely week :)

Izzy K xxx

Thursday 20 July 2017

Gap Year Guide Part 3: Route, Transport & Accommodation

Hello and welcome to my 3rd post in my "Gap Year Guide" which will be focusing on where I actually went, and how I actually got around Europe for a month. 

Feel free to check out my Insta for more travel photos ;)

Route:


Me and Georgie wanted to cover as many cities and countries as possible in a month, so we decided to go pretty much straight across Europe and hit as many countries as we could. Our route was as follows:
  • Sofia, Bulgaria: 2nd-5th May
  • Plovdiv, Bulgaria: 5th-6th May
  • Bucharest, Romania: 6th- 9th May
  • Brasov, Romania: 9th- 11th May
  • Budapest, Hungary: 12th- 14th May
  • Zagreb, Croatia: 15th-17th May
  • Split, Croatia: 17th- 19th May
  • Ljubljana, Slovenia: 19th-22nd May
  • Bled, Slovenia: 22nd-24th May
  • Vienna, Austria: 24th- 26th May
  • Berlin, Germany: 26th-28th May
  • Brussels, Belgium: 28th- 30th May
  • Paris, France: 30th-31st May
  • Dover, England: 31st May

Transport:


We only wanted to fly once on our travels, so we decided to fly out from Birmingham Airport to Sofia Airport. The company we flew with was EasyJet.

We then wanted to find the easiest way to travel between countries, and concluded that Interrail tickets were the cheapest way to do that. The ticket I brought was a youth ticket where you could travel for 15 days within the period of a month. We found that most countries where we used our ticket understood what it was. The only trouble we had was in Bulgaria, where we found that the language barrier was the strongest. However, the ticket was accepted in every country we went to. On their website you can fill in your route, but I would recommend checking if you have to reserve a train seat because on most trains you do. There is a hidden cost of reserving train tickets though, so watch out for that!

Then for the journey home we decided to get the ferry from Calais to Dover and we booked this using Directferries.com for £30 each. Then using National Express, we booked our coaches from Dover Ferry Port to Birmingham Airport. 

And for transport around the actual cities we used either tram, or underground lines. Or, if it was available in that country, we used Uber. 

Accommodation:


For our first night, we wanted to stop somewhere close to the airport since we arrived in the middle of the night. So we booked a room in the Ibis hotel which was opposite the airport.

The only other time we booked a hotel was in Budapest where we booked the Hotel Griff. We needed somewhere that was close to the train station, since we had a very early morning train. To be honest, the reviews of this 3 star hotel kinda put us off stopping there, but it wasn't a terrible place to stop and it did the job.

The rest of our accommodation we booked on AirBnB. In case you didn't know, this is a way to book different types of accommodation, rented out by different people from all over the world. A lot of people are scared at the thought of this, but from my experience I can definitely say it's a reliable way to book apartments. All the hosts we had were lovely and helpful, and we were very comfortable in every place we stayed. 

We booked the first week of accommodation before we left England so we certainly had places to stop when we got there. Then we'd always make sure we'd have the week ahead's accommodation booked in advance. But the reason we didn't book it all at once was because we didn't want to have a last minute change, and have to cancel or change all our accommodation. So once we knew for sure where we were going, we'd book the most reasonably priced AirBnB we could find.

So there you are, that's how me and Georgie traveled around Europe for a month. The song of the day is Beat Again by JLS. As always, I tried to go into as much detail as I could for this post, but if you have any further questions please don't hesitate to ask in the comments. Thank you for reading,

Izzy K xxx

Sunday 16 July 2017

Weekly Summary Post: 2nd Week Of July

Hey guys it's that time of the week again where I share what you might have missed on my channel over the last 7 days...

Simple Summer Makeup Look

Since it's Summer and it's difficult to be able to wear a lot of makeup without it sliding off your face, I decided to create a simple and sweat-proof makeup routine to share. 

Which Decade Do I Belong In?

And as you all probably know, I'm seriously obsessed with the 00's decade so I decided to take a test to see what decade I truly belong in.

So here we go, that's what's been on my channel this week. The song of the day is Love On The Brain by Rihanna. I hope you've all had a lovely week,

Izzy K xxx

Wednesday 12 July 2017

Gap Year Guide Part 2: Finance

Hi everyone and welcome to my second edition of my “Gap Year Guide” which will be focused all about how I actually financed my trip.

Feel free to check out my Instagram @izzyk1998 for more travel pics ;)

If you guys missed my first post (which you can catch up with here) you will know that I traveled around mainly Eastern Europe for a month with my best friend. Now, obviously, for that time period you do have to budget and make the money last for the whole trip. This is how I achieved that. …

The first thing I’ll talk about is my actual saving goal for the holiday. Ideally I wanted to save £3000 to spend on anything related to travelling this year. I knew that I wanted to travel in May, so in September I got a job in a retailer. Since I got paid weekly, I got roughly between £156-180 a week depending on the hours I worked. It’s unrealistic to assume that I wouldn’t need money during the week, so I always made sure I had a bit of money in my current account, just to cover things like buying birthday presents, going out and a cheeky bit of shopping. But I never wanted to have more than £150 in my current account so I wouldn’t go on a crazy shopping spree and blow all my money at once. So every week that I got paid I transferred any money that I had over £150 into my savings account with the intention to spend it on travelling. Needless to say my savings soon built up.

Now I didn’t spend all my savings for travelling at once. We found a good deal on Interrail tickets if we brought them by the end of January (I believe it was January) and got 15% off for booking it at that time. And another way I was able to make the money last was by looking for cheaper alternatives to everything. I’ll be doing a specific post about accommodation, but an example of a cheaper alternative was booking AirBnBs instead of hotels because then half our savings would be gone on accommodation alone.

Another thing me and my friend did before we went travelling was budgeting our money between different accounts. I kept some of my money in my current account with my ordinary debit card since it was linked to my PayPal which is what I used to book AirBnB’s. And then the majority of my savings was transferred to my FX card. I’m so lucky that my friend advised me to get one of these cards, because they have less of a charge when you use them internationally compared to ordinary credit/debit cards. So that’s another way to save money whilst travelling between different countries.

And since it was probably a good idea to have some cash on us when we arrived to each country, we got some exchanged at our local M&S shop. We did this because there’s no minimum money that you have to exchange there. So we went halves on the currency and for the two of us took out:
  •         £100 Bulgarian Lev
  •         £150 Romainan Lei
  •          £100 Hungarian Forint
  •          £100 Croatian Kuna
  •          £150 Euros

So there we are, that’s how I budgeted my travelling for my gap year. The song of the day is It Aint Me by Selena Gomez. I tried to go into as much detail as possible for my gap year guide, but if you have any further questions please don’t hesitate to ask me. Thank you very much for reading,

Izzy K xxx