Around the world in 80 Mays

I thought I’d take a quick break from posting videos to give a summary of what I’ve done on the blog this year and hint at what’s to come in 2009!

2008 was a great year for me; I started in London, travelled through the Northeast of Brazil and hosted 40 people during the Carnival, then went to Tenerife to hike up Mount Teide. I spent a nice summer in Ireland to improve my Irish, followed by a quick trip to Slovakia to learn Esperanto, then the states to camp in the desert and finally Argentina to learn some tango!

I started the year with the plan to share my travels on this blog through videos (since as you can tell from this entry, I’m a very dull writer!!) and I’m very happy with how it’s progressed. I’ve recently redesigned the site to include some “widgets” on the right, such as my upcoming travel plans, an easy subscribe option with number of subscribers (already over a hundred) and I’ll add more options as I expand on the website. I’ll constantly update these widgets so even though I still only post one or two videos per month (it’s a lot of work since I translate each video to 7 languages), but the right hand side of my site will change regularly.

For example I have included my twitter updates, and every day I will be writing in this miniblog in each of the 7 languages on my blog. It is somewhat like an independent facebook status update and you can always see what I’m up to on that! If you want to practice another language I recommend you try to write in such a miniblog daily in that language. The maximum character limit of 140 means it really isn’t that much work. It’s been great for making sure I write in each language that I want to practise every single day.

So what’s to come in 2009? My current travel plans include spending 2 months or so in the Goa region in India, followed by 2 months in Sicily. After the summer somewhere in Europe I’ll head back towards Latin America. However, these plans may change. If I find some interesting events or discoveries in those places I’ll make short videos to share with you in documentary style!

In the mean time I’ll be uploading a lot more playful advice videos, not related to where I am. These will be about some things I’ve learned in the last few years that I’d really like to share with you that help me travel better and use the Internet to work efficiently. My most popular video by far has been the hand-luggage one (over 16,000 views in just two months), so they will be in a similar ridiculous, funny (yet practical) style. Upcoming videos include the following:

* Hand luggage video part 2: How to bring all you want with you, this time using NO BAGS. If you liked my towel trick, you’ll love my other ideas…
* What is RSS?
* Stumbleupon video – channel hopping of the 21st century.
* How to avoid wasting time on the Internet

By popular demand I will also be sharing some language learning tips and giving hints as to how I travel so much while working and possibly giving some translation tips too. If you’d like to see any of these videos as soon as they are available and haven’t subscribed yet, just use the email (or RSS)  subscription option on the right!!

Your comments now and later will be much appreciated!! How I develop the site depends entirely on the feedback I get from you. What do you want to see, what don’t you want to see? Complaints or compliments? Just type them in below!

We now return to your regularly scheduled programming