Cardiff I: When in doubt, give people food.

I gave up on blogging from my phone after two days because it takes ages and is highly annoying, so be ready for a series of retrospect posts here!

On Wednesday, I travelled to Cardiff by train, but first I went to have breakfast with a lovely Australian girl called Rose. It was nice getting to know someone after two days of wandering around alone - not that I mind travelling on my own, but it was good for a change.

In Cardiff I met an American girl called Bianca, who just flew in from New York and was about to start studying in Swansea for a semester. Amazingly, it was her first time out of the States, and the first time she'd been on a plane. I can't imagine going to live so far from home if you've never been outside of your own country - even if that country is the United States of America. I have to admire her for not being afraid. We explored the town together for a bit. It was a day full of new people and places - I like those days. 

The best thing about Cardiff was easily the Riverhouse Backpackers hostel, though. I've never seen anything quite like it or met such nice people as the owners. I'm not even going to start praising it here - if you ever go to Cardiff, just go there. It's brilliant. I'll just give you this quote from the owner Charlie, which I think I will adopt as my life's motto: "When in doubt, give people food!"

Good times in Cardiff. I'll need to go back there sometime to see some more of the place.

In the meantime: here's that video from Hampstead Heath I couldn't upload last week. Sorry for the awful quality, but I'm sure you get the idea.

After the rain

Eh. Did I say last time that I was gonna post more regularly? No? Good. Because I didn't. Yeah. Sorry.
I really need to set deadlines for myself, or start making lists, or something! I'll make that my late new year's resolution.

In my defense, it's been a really busy week. I took on a five-day temp job to earn some money. I will spare you the details (it involved a scanner and loads of invoices. Yeah.), but when I spend the whole day behind a computer, I just don't feel like turning mine on when I come home to write a blog post. (Also, with a job like that, there's really nowhere to get inspiration from, so maybe we should all be happy about that.)

Then in the weekend I went out, and my bag got stolen, yay. Then I went to the police station, they retrieved my wallet with most of my stuff but no debit/credit cards or keys, really yay. Then I had to go to the dentist. Very un-yay.

BUT there's good news too: I'm going to the UK on Monday! Yay yay yay! I managed to get myself a ticket to the BBC GetIn event in Cardiff, which is basically a big info session about the BBC Trainee Schemes and the Talent Pool. I'm very excited about that indeed! And since it seemed a bit stupid to travel all the way there (by BUS, because the Eurostar is damn expensive) to stay only one day, I'm spending the rest of the week in London. YAAAAAY! Compensates for the crappy weekend!

I'll try to do blog updates from London/Cardiff, but it's gonna be from my phone, so apologies in advance for crappy layouts and all that. If you want to follow my travelling adventures, in this case Instagram might be the best place. Find me here:  (or by the name of Mayasounds, of course).

In the meantime: still trying to finish my Work Experience application for the BBC too. It's so hard. Ugh.

Why UK?

You may wonder why exactly I've chosen to look specifically in the UK at the moment. The reasons are manifold, here are the principal ones:

1) The UK is awesome and I would love to live/work there for the rest of my life (at least I think so right now), so why waste more time in Belgium?

2) I love a change of environment every now and then. It makes me creative.

3) They do short work experience placements, which is exactly what I want right now. I haven't found anything similar in Belgium so far; it's all internships here, and they are usually long.

Can't learn as much if the placement is too short, I hear you say? Not entirely true. In my opera house internship, I learned loads in the first month, and hardly anything in the last three, because the tasks just started to repeat. That's why I'd prefer several short placements over one very long one - which only means I'm making things more difficult for myself, but hey, I'm still a woman right.

4) Any opportunity to improve my English is most welcome. I would especially like to pick up some kind of a stable accent at some point, instead of the current situation where I adapt my accent to whoever I'm talking to (which, oddly, causes Americans to think I'm Irish, Irish people in Ireland to think I'm American, Irish people abroad to think I'm Irish, and Polish people to think I'm taking the piss out of them).

5) Tea and scones. That is all.

What's next?

Happy New Year one and all! I took a bit of time off to relax after finishing my last internship, and obviously I was too lazy to even write a blog post in that time... Apologies! Here it is at last.

So what's next?
Nothing definite so far. I've been on the lookout for my next job for a while, but unfortunately I've had very little time, a lot to do, and Christmas in the way. To complicate matters a bit for myself, I've also decided to look for work in the UK this time, which means translating my CV to English and writing my cover letters in English, also pretty time consuming when you want things to be perfect.

I am mainly searching in the media business. Top of the list is - of course - the BBC. I've been keeping an eye on their opportunities for a while - they have a really interesting work experience programme, for which applications happen to open tomorrow. Of course I know I am aiming pretty high here - I estimate they receive about 8000 applications per position or thereabouts. But so be it - if you don't aim high, you can never hit high, right?

I'm also looking around for other opportunities, of course. I applied for work experience at NME magazine - something totally different, I am aware, but this whole year is about trying things, and I would really like to try both. As you have noticed, I like writing, but I also love television as a medium, and I hope I'll have a chance to explore both.

In any case, I am more and more convinced that my future lies somewhere in the media business. I especially love that balance between education and entertainment - a thing of beauty when kept well. It is important that people get informed correctly about things that go on in the world - but information goes down a lot easier when nicely packaged. I think the BBC is very good at keeping that balance most of the time. It's something I would love to be involved in. In a way, NME tries to do the same on a smaller scale, for a different public, and through a different medium. It would be interesting to be able to compare their methods.

Anyway, that's the dream scenario. Let's see how it goes! The search continues.