Sri Lanka - Visiting family and friends

So I've just started back at uni and things have been pretty busy getting settled back in, hence the lack of posts - sorry! Here's a bit more on our time in Sri Lanka :) A lot of the time we spend in Sri Lanka was visiting family and friends we hadn't seen in years. There was an awful lot of people who I knew the name of but didn't actually remember from our last visit... As much as I love having family in far flung places (makes for good holiday destinations!), it is really hard to remember who is who, how they're related to you and, above all, how you pronounce their name! Eventually I got the hang of them and we had a good time looking at old photos and talking about our last visit there. There was one evening at Mum's cousin's house that we spent the majority of the time singing and making music which was so much fun. We did also do some sight seeing, but that's a post for another day. For now, I'll leave you with some pictures of my Sri Lankan family and friends.

Sri Lanka 2015/2016

My Sri Lankan heritage is something I don't appear to have spoken about here before... Which is surprising, because it's something I'm really proud of. My Granddad (Mum's dad) is from Sri Lanka and we call him Siya, which is Sinhalese for Grandfather. Before this Christmas, I had only been to Sri Lanka once when I was 10 for some friends wedding so, after my exams, I was really excited to go because it had been 10 years since we last went and because we were all older we would be able to do more when we were there. The last time we went we spent the majority of the time in the pool in the hotel because we were young (my sisters were 7, 3 and 3 and my cousins were similar ages). Though we did do a three day trip up into the highlands which was good fun. We did a similar thing this time but we spent a lot more time seeing family and friends too rather than going to the hotel pool.

We were staying with Siya in the house he had built which was lovely. It was big and spacious and very close to the hotel we stayed in the last time we went which is where we went this time to swim.

Siya's house

The hotel we went to was The Blue Water which I would highly recommend. It's a beautiful hotel and the staff are extremely helpful and friendly. From what I remember from the last time when we stayed there the rooms were lovely too, but I was 10 then so I didn't really pay much attention to it, I was more interested in the pool - which was great too!

 The Blue Water hotel pool

The first full day we were there we spent most of the day at the hotel pool which was a lovely relaxing way to start our holiday after a long time traveling to get there. It's only 11 hours in total, but when you factor in waiting times for flights and time differences it adds up to about 24 hours... And travelling is exhausting at the best of times! I spent the majority of the first flight watching Bridge of Spies which I really enjoyed (might do a post on that later) and then on the second flight I read The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss which is the sequel to The Name of the Wind both of which I loved and can't wait for the next book in the series (again, probably more on that later).

Because we did so much in Sri Lanka I'm going to split up the posts into days or according to the kinds of things we did. I will warn you now, the majority of these posts will be photos! Here's some from the first day:

More to follow soon!

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Major catch up...

So, it's been over a year since I decided to take a break from blogging... I hadn't intended to take as long a break as that, but life got in the way and I forgot about blogging all together. I wasn't happy with the direction this space was taking so I stopped. I didn't have a clue about what to write, whether to find a niche, something to focus on, or just keep it fairly random. Whilst there are benefits to both, I still don't really know what I want to do. So my current plan is to just do what I feel like until either I come up with a plan, or I fall into some sort of niche that suits. I guess that's what most bloggers do...

Now, to catch you up on what's been happening. Well I'm now in my last year of university, and I still don't have a clue what I want to have a career in when I finish. I study psychology, and I know I want to work with kids, I know I love music and dance and theatre, so I would love to do something combining all that... Impossible, I know. I guess I just have to keep looking. At the moment I'm thinking that I'm just going to work next year and then decide whether to go back to uni for a masters/postgrad or just to keep working. Either way, I need to work next year because I couldn't afford to go back into uni straight away.

Outside of academics, I've actually not been doing a huge amount... I'm not long back from an amazing holiday in Sri Lanka (posts to follow) and I'm going back this summer to volunteer on a Performing Arts with Special Needs placement. I'm so excited but I need to get started on fundraising soon as I need to raise £2000 to go... So I expect there'll be a lot of that on the blog too!

Also over the last year I've been trying to lose weight with varying degrees of success, another topic that will undoubtedly be mentioned several times.

So, in a nutshell, I've not done a huge amount over the last year... A few big events but not much really. As I come to graduate uni, I'll be sharing more of my big life events here as I try to find a home for my blog.

Hope to see you here again!

And I'm back...

Well hi there, and welcome to my humble blog.

This is an old blog which I'm not quite ready to get rid of yet, nor do I know how to redesign and re-organise it fully so I'm currently stuck with it as it is. Because of this, some of the information is wrong... I'm no longer 19 for one thing! So, a few years older (but not much wiser), I've come back to make one more attempt at blogging. This time, I'm going to take things as they come and there will be recipes, tutorials, hair things, music things, lots of books and general life. Maybe one day I'll get to change the look of things around here, but at the moment, please enjoy The Journals of  a Piccolo Pixie.