Spring travels: First stop - Leeds

Another uni term has ended, no more lectures until 2014 *Gasp. So, time to break free before exams and travel. First destination - Lithuania. But what fun is taking a direct flight when you can take the long way round :) Therefore another travel season has just been opened with a small trip to Leeds from which we were to catch a flight to LT through Germany.

Upon arrival in Leeds we were fairly hungry after a 3 hour coach ride to get there. We had packed 3 burgers for such a situation and went in search of shelter where we could consume our food away from the cold. As we needed the fine resource of the internet to check our next destination we set our sites on a place that would offer free wifi. Walking by we spotted the ultimate destination that was to suit all our needs - a busy McDonald's with wifi - a perfect place where we could eat our food without getting looks as who could tell the difference between burgers anyway :P

After our cheeky lunch break we made way round the city centre admiring the architecture and the little things such as street musicians whose jazz music made the walk all the more merry. Then headed over to this new shopping centre where we had to meet up with someone who was going to put us up for the night and receive a city map from them. And boy was it busy, had to wait in a line to get to the escalator and you could just see the masses flow as a current. Even though this was a shopping centre it proved to be quite impressive  being practically outside with a glass roof and connections between different buildings which might not be the best thing with all the cold weather, but looks cool so oh well. Had some interesting sculptures that caught our eye such as this one of a horse:

Photo by Ieva Cesnulaityte

After walking the highly commercial streets we decided to make our way to the outskirts of the centre and ended up in this building which we though would be a museum or something along those lines but ended up to be another shopping bazaar, but this time filled with specialty stores and hosting a vinyl record market that day. After looking through the selection I picked out a few records to bring back as gifts:

Another little shop - 'Candy Candy' caught our eyes. It sold handmade scented soaps and other bath products which smelled of beautiful summer dreams :) It took us a while to chose the perfect ones, but I finally set my mind on these two:

The last one we went into was this small bead store, had a chat with the owner and bought some beads for our future handmade jewelry. A lovely experience and now just need to all meet up for a crafty afternoon with the girls :)

Photo by Ieva Cesnulaityte

Photo by Ieva Cesnulaityte

After walking around a couple more arcades (seriously, Leeds is such a shopping city) we headed off to our temporary residence where we ended up spending about 4 hours lounged in some incredibly comfortable sofas, eating our typical student dinner - pasta, in 3 goes as the the only pot we had to use was only big enough for one portion to be cooked at a time. We then spent an interesting evening keeping people company at their pre-drinks as we were not keen on going out before our 6am wake up the next day...

Photo by Ieva Cesnulaityte

Photo by Agota Mockute

Photo by Ieva Cesnulaityte

We left Leeds in a hurry the next morning rushing out to catch our bus to the airport not realizing that we can't actually open the automatic gate to leave... so we did what anyone would do, we climbed over the gate and hurried off as there was no time to wake up anyone to let us out as decent people. Oh well, this way is much more fun anyway :D

Songs to learn

End of term is just around the corner. With no more lectures to go to, I have a bit more time to spend on the little things I enjoy doing like playing the guitar, spinning poi and hopefully writing more in this blog (hoping to write a big post on the dance show I was in last week when I get some photos ^^). 

The guitar never leaves my mind though, when I'm not learning new songs, I think about ones I want to learn when I'm not so extremely busy, because let's face it, while in uni I'm running around like crazy every day, going to event after event, societies, talks, econ experiments (my only source of extra income at the moment :P ) etc. I don't have much time to dedicate to learning new music. So, I have put together a short list of songs I would love to learn now that I have that little bit of free time :)

1.  KT Tunstall - Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.

Love the looping woohoos and the beat, a bit of scratching that could be a new easy technique to learn. Also, a bit more upbeat than most songs from my repertoire.


2. Jack Johnson - Sitting, Waiting, Wishing. 

More suitable for an acoustic guitar (even though most of my songs are...) so maybe learn this one while at home :)


3. Extreme - More Than Words.

Love, love, love this song, the feeling in it, already know how to sing it and it has similar plucking patterns to a song I already know how to play, but can't seem to get past the first few beats. Maybe learn this one over the summer, it requires dedication.

Can't wait to be able to play any of these and sing along! :) Can already imagine those camp-fires,  sitting in a circle of close friends and just playing into the night...

A window of opportunity

Ok, for the second year in a row I've ended up with a room that has very little sunlight and only one window.  Even though I couldn't do anything about the first issue, a change to the second ended up to be possible, well with a bit of imagination at least.

I had loads of photographs and needed to think of a way to display them so hey, why not combine my needs and make a window out of photos I thought. This is the turnout of this master plan, a window to my memories: 

Naturally I had to include a tree, had to be done.

When the circus comes to town

For those who don't know, over the past couple of years I've been rather involved in circus'y activities :D This all started when my very talented cousin taught me a few poi tricks and then escalated with me joining the circus society in my university. Joining the society has given me the chance to not only raise my poi spinning skill, but also give come other fun things a go such as unicycling (can now ride ~10m before falling down - a major achievement for me), staff, juggling (still keep walking forward whilst doing it for some unknown reason) and contact juggling. Am still contemplating whether to buy fire poi to spin in my back yard (finish off that shed that burnt half way the year before we moved in... :P )

Was lucky enough to be there on a day they were taking pictures for the new banner and so my silhouette is now on it! Try to guess which one I am ;)