Tag: travel

My city break in the Far East

My city break in the Far East

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

For my next trip I didn’t fly solo: I had the pleasure of exploring a part of the Far East with my lovely best friend of 9 years. We chose South Korea as our holiday destination for many reasons. The main being that ever since we were 15/16 we have grown a love and appreciation (and for a time, a slight obsession) for K-Pop. We then quickly fell in love with Korean culture as a whole. Now I know that most people hate to admit any affection for Pop music, let alone foreign Pop music, since it’s generally deemed uncool or lacking authenticity. Thus I realise that half of the people reading this have probably just rolled their eyes at that sentence. But hear me out.

In recent years Western Pop music has begun to pay very close attention to the Korean music industry. K-Pop itself is completely manufactured, but just because it’s manufactured doesn’t mean that it doesn’t showcase talent and originality. Granted, what’s spoken about within the songs is often not particularly raw, personalised emotion, but to dismiss the work put into each song and performance for that reason is unfair. I’m no more than a music lover, so I can’t even fathom the amount of time and effort individuals within the industry put into writing, producing and performing the songs. To add to that, in K-Pop every single released has an accompanying dance routine which has been created, choreographed and performed by someone. That doesn’t even take into account the talent and creativity showcased within the Korean music video industry, where each 3 minute video is treated as if it were a fully fledged feature film. And then there’s all the design of the clothes, and the live shows, and the make-up…

This acute attention to detail is prevalent in all parts of South Korean culture. The buildings are ridiculously well-designed, the food is amazing and the people are all immaculately dressed. My best friend and I felt pretty out of place in our 3 year old jeans… Everything was just so bloody clean, and there weren’t even that many bins knocking about.

It became clear that the Korean people have a level of internal discipline that the West lack. This was not a huge surprise given that the Far East Asian stereotype is that there are many child prodigies able to play Debussy aged 10 and consistently achieve perfect grades at school. Obviously this stereotype is true for a tiny percentage of the population, but for everyone else it’s just that: a stereotype. Regardless of their musical or academic ability however, the South Korean psyche is such that everyone strives for success and to be the best. So the presentation of everything within the society just seemed next level, to me.

Having independently studied South Korea, I’m aware of some of the pros and cons of this ambitious, dedicated and persistent psyche. The people and their creations appear beautiful and perfected but their mental health suffers from the idea that not being faultless is a failure. Students study for obscene lengths of time (often 15 hours a day) in Hagwon institutions and plastic surgery is rampant as the people attempt to reach a ludicrously narrow standard of beauty.

I believe travelling is the best way to realise that no society is infallible, but that all of them should be of interest in one way or another. To me, South Korean people are some of the kindest and warmest around, in a way that the English aren’t. Generally, without even realising it we are cold and reserved here but then in my opinion we have a killer sense of humour and our sarcasm is unmatched. The South Koreans have managed to create a clean, successful and rich society even in the context of losing half of its land, resources and people just 74 years ago. Whereas the British have a history rich with invention and multiculturalism. But South Korea also has such intense societal pressures that often to fail academically is to fail completely. Whilst one of Britain’s societal shortcomings is the recently magnified problem with xenophobia and racism.

I love both countries for their successes, failures and for how they continue to evolve. In my eyes, to say that one culture is backwards or less advanced than another is a pointless statement. What should be focused on is that people can, should, and sometimes do learn from each other.

Life in the Nepali jungle

Life in the Nepali jungle

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

To be honest, the first thing I want to say about Nepal is that it’s just a ridiculously beautiful country that everyone should visit. So that’s the core of this blog established. But hey, whilst we’re here we may as well elaborate. ONWARDS.

Nepal is super famous for it’s mountains, the Himalayas, and all the amazing hiking routes they offer. Saying that, my experience was spent living and volunteering in the heart of the Chitwan jungle. Needless to say, the scenery was some of the most stunning I will EVER see. I could go all English Lit student and spend paragraphs describing it but even then I could never ever do it justice with words. So, to be brief: we woke up to the sound of monkeys and showered surrounded by geckos. Enough said.

3 weeks in this country introduced me to so many breathtaking things: one of the first to strike me, was the overwhelming poverty of the people. You hear so much about third world countries in the news, and see adverts on TV showing images of starving children so often that somehow the tragedies become trivialised. When physically seeing the way some people live every day in a glorified hut in the middle of nowhere however, you’re forced to understand the reality of true poverty. And it’s astonishing.

Actually, the first scene I saw when driving from Kathmandu airport was a naked child relieving himself on what can only be described as a mound of rubbish by the side of a dusty road. But poverty in Nepal manifested itself in so many more ways than just stark images such as that.

I worked as a children’s English teacher with 2 other English girls, and 1 Montenegrin girl in a Buddhist monastery for most of the 3 weeks: the children’s ages ranged from 6 to 18 and there were around 100 of them, some orphans and some not. The Nepali government’s textbooks we used to teach were riddled with grammatical errors and nonsensical sentences. We would correct these mistakes in front of the classes as we read the children the same thing they’d been reading for months, only now we told them what they thought they’d already learnt, was wrong. We constantly fought against confusing them in order to teach them correct English. The kids themselves were an absolute joy to teach: they tried so hard to follow everything we were saying as they scrawled notes in their beloved (dilapidated) exercise books.

The poverty they experience is all-encompassing. As mentioned, their school equipment is basic to say the least. They eat the same thing every day so their level of sufficient nutrition is non-existent. They rinse their plates under a tap and eat with their hands. They wear the same school uniforms every day and the clothes they have for leisure are clearly second-hand, since they’re covered in holes and stains. They live in the most basic housing and their bathrooms are definitely not sanitary judging from the smell. They shower and clean their clothes in the same area outside with minimal soap. Many of their little bald heads show the marks of ringworm.

These children deserve so much more than the amazing staff of the monastery could ever give them. The nuns and teachers devote most of their lives to the kids and the amount they care is tangible, but there is seriously only so much that they can do with what they have. It became painfully obvious to my 3 new friends and I that everyone there couldn’t even fathom our European lives, nor would we ever really be able to explain it to them.

It’s obviously heart-breaking that people live in situations such as this, without the basic resources the West don’t even pay much attention to. That being said, we, the ‘privileged’, can learn so much from people such as those I met in Nepal. The children and staff in the monastery might have lacked so much when it came to physical things but their love for life and each other shone a different light on my world.

I spent every day in that monastery in total bliss: listening to them sing in the temple at dawn, mealtimes and dusk; lying on the roof with my friends watching my first ever shooting star inside a sea of others; laughing with children and adults who tried so hard to, but could barely understand much of what I said, and most of all, just not even slightly caring about material things. My parents never encouraged me to care much about objects, but the reality is that our society conditions us to rely on them no matter how hard we try.

Obviously we could and should supply these people with more money and resources. Everyone already knows that. On a human level though, I think that every financially comfortable individual should be physically exposed to true poverty. Then assess their own privilege, hold back their pity, and celebrate how humans always find a way to survive, and how they smile whilst they’re at it. Those kids in that jungle are financially poor but I know so many people in the West who are a whole lot poorer than they are when it comes to an appreciation of being alive.

So all in all, Nepal taught me to just take a second. And enjoy.

GAP YAH

GAP YAH

by elizabethmdouglas ♥ 0 Leave a Comment

Hello! My name is Elizabeth and I’ve spent part of the past year travelling the world. But due to my physical disability, I’ve had to be slightly more creative in how and where I chose to spend my time overseas. So whilst I may not have hiked up the Himalayas, I did sit and paraglide over them- but I’ll come to tell the details of the cool stuff I did this year in future posts. Since this is just an introduction, I couldn’t possibly give too much away so soon…


A main theme of this year has been talking. I LOVE talking. I love to talk about absolutely anything with anyone who wants to talk to me. As far as I’m concerned, conversation is a completely underrated medium of expression. Simply by talking to new people this year I’ve learnt an indescribable amount: about people on a personal level; people in the context of their culture and language; then how all of these elements to someone’s life can affect how they think and communicate. One huge conversation of this year has been answering the question posed to me by my friends: did you find yourself? And I did. Ever so slightly. (And I puked a little just typing that…)


Whilst the phrase ‘to find oneself’ may or may not mean a lot to you, personally, I’m a product of my Northern English working/middle class upbringing so it just makes me cringe. Regardless of this, the past 12 months have taught me that the phrase is relevant to my life. But what does it even mean?


Nerdy moment and big words to follow…


Well the pretentious connotations surrounding the words have largely been created as a result of rich upper class kids exploring the third world, as a kind of penance to pay society back for their inherited wealth (and because they can). This causes those less financially fortunate to feel resentment- both actively and passively- towards that class of people, sometimes leading them to take the mick. This psyche unsurprisingly distracts from the actual meaning of the words themselves. So whilst my observation may seem blunt, it’s been the way of the world for centuries that those with less money than others generally become jealous very quickly. In this country our societal jealousy often manifests itself in humour and mockery. Good old Brits with their sarcasm. But most of the time it’s not even the wealth itself that sparks the jealousy, it’s the opportunities that money provides for people.

In a culture where reality is so easily tainted by apps such as Instagram, it’s no surprise that this pattern continues and has arguably intensified in recent years. At this point it’s important to say that I’m in no way attempting to devalue those with money giving back to the world and travelling, but it’s also difficult for those who’d love to do the same but can’t afford it, to see. Thus the phrase and act of ‘finding oneself’ is mocked alongside the term ‘gap year’ – which is often said in an exaggeratedly ‘posh’ London accent i.e. ‘gap yah’. I’m even guilty of saying it like this and I have harem pants and bead bracelets just like my fellow gap yah-ers. Call me a hypocrite.


Though I don’t believe that you can go and sit in the jungle for a few weeks and ‘find yourself’ definitively by any means, I will argue that completely separating myself from the familiar has given me a new perspective on the world and my place in it. The state of society at the minute is such that we’re provided with lots of opinions as statements, and oftentimes there’s little discussion about what’s said.


SO, I guess I’m going to use this platform to talk about some stuff and I hope that you take enjoyment out of reading it. But if you don’t, then you read to here so I still win.
🙂