5 TRAVEL ESSENTIALS YOU NEED FOR A TRIP AWAY

Saturday

As a lot of people are travelling more now, whether that be around the UK or abroad, it's important to know what to pack. Many of us will be out of the swing of it due to various coronavirus restrictions on travel, especially abroad.


For this reason, I am going to share with you a few of my travel essentials. I usually try to pack as light as possible because I hate having to carry heavy bags when I go anywhere, so this will probably be bare essentials and I may miss some stuff out that is important to you. These are just my tips.


woman walking through airport with luggage
Image by Gustavo Fring on Pexels.


5 essentials you need for travelling


1. A separate purse or wallet


Now, this one is mainly for if you are travelling abroad and have different currency. I always like to take a separate purse for my holiday money or any holiday cards so I don't get it mixed up with my UK cash. You don't need to do this, I just find it easier and it gives me an excuse to have another purse. Also, if you have any tickets for anything you can keep them in the holiday purse too.

2. Miniatures


Having small toiletries for travel is so much easier as it takes up so much less space and you may only be allowed under 100ml liquids if you are travelling with hand luggage anyway.

3. Hand sanitiser


I mean this one really doesn't need an explanation but it's just essential to have on you at all times to make sure those hands are clean.

4. Portable charger


If you're like me, then you will need a fully charged phone to take pictures and videos of every waking moment of the holiday. It's also important to have a charged phone in case you need to call anyone or use google maps to find something.

5. Pain killers


Any time I travel, I seem to be cursed with getting a headache. Whether it's from getting up early, or maybe drinking a little too much while I'm away, I always seem to get one. So I would definitely recommend taking pain killers with you. I learnt this the hard way when I went to Mallorca a few years ago. I needed painkillers and they cost me around 5 euros on the resort when in the UK they are literally 40p.

So there we have it. Everyone is different and will have different essentials, and it depends on where you are travelling to as well. Obviously, if you are travelling abroad you will need a passport and boarding passes. If you are going on a long haul flight you will need different essentials - I may write a separate blog post on this.
What is one thing you can't travel without?

BEING A NICE PERSON: THE LOW DOWN

Welcome to another post in my The Low Down series, where I get a bit more serious and give you the low down on things. For this one, I am just going to be sharing ways to genuinely just be a nice person which I feel like is pretty obvious, but a lot of people seem to need it?


Now, you might be bored of hearing about kindness now, especially as it has been heavily emphasised since the start of the pandemic, and a few years back we had the #BeKind movement. But have you ever stopped to think how we only have movements like that after someone has taken their own life? And afterwards, it doesn't take long for people to forget about the detrimental, and even fatal effects that nastiness has on our mental health.


be kind green tiles on pink backrgound

Related: Toxic positivity: The low down

A lot of people reading this will be thinking, being kind is so obvious, like why would you not be? But you'd be surprised by the amount of people who sadly are not. Every day, I hear about influencers and creators getting hate on a daily basis. Just look at the boys in the England team getting racial abuse for not scoring penalties, rather than getting praised for coming so far at a young age. Racism is a complete other topic and it is never OK in any situation. But it just goes to show how quickly people can turn nasty as these were supposedly England 'fans'.


Take Love Island as another example, sadly a few people have taken their own lives as a result of the hate they had received from being on the show. But this year, people are still giving them hate and tweeting awful things about them. OK, we all judge people on TV a little bit sometimes and maybe don't always agree with their decisions, but they are just ordinary humans on the TV with feelings. If you really have to say something nasty about someone on the TV or someone online, it's so easy to just send something privately to a friend rather than broadcasting it so that they can see.

Related: Friendships: the low down

These are just a few recent examples, but I'm sure if I ask you about a time someone has been nasty to you personally, you could tell me straight away. And being online, does make it easier for people to be unkind, but it's not always online.


We are all just getting through life and enough shit has gone on with things like Covid, climate change and just general other bad stuff for anyone to have to put up with people being dicks on top of that. So I am going to give you some of my own personal advice on how to just be a nice person generally, and just to live life in more of a happy way. 


I'm not saying I'm an amazingly nice person, no one is perfect and it's hard to be kind all the time - especially because there are some real arseholes out there. Most of my blog readers are lovely too! I am just using my platform for important topics.


How to be a nice person


1. Try to find happiness within yourself

The first step in this is really working on you. In my experience, most of the people who feel the need to put others down are insecure in themselves. This isn't easy and this could be a whole other blog post - but once you accept things about yourself and don't compare yourself to others, you will be much more happy for them and won't feel the need to put them down anymore.


2. Keep your mouth shut

As humans, it's natural to think things about people that sometimes aren't the nicest but do they need to hear these thoughts? Probably not. Again, it's all about accepting differences. 


3. Compliment people

Kindness is something that becomes habitual and once you start practising it more, it will come more easily and naturally. Try and compliment people and say positive things to them, this could make them feel so much better and will also make you feel better about yourself too.


4. Surround yourself with positivity

In this blog post, I'm not saying go out of your way to make friends with people who aren't your usual type of person. To become a happier and kinder person, it will actually be a lot better for you to cut toxic and negative people out of your life. Toxic people make other people toxic, so try to surround yourself with kind people and people who make you feel good about yourself. 


5. Do's and don'ts


Do 

  • Work on your happiness
  • Compliment people and promote kindness
  • Spend your time with nice people
Don't 

  • Put others down to make yourself feel better
  • Be rude and say nasty things

Sorry about the moody blog post - I am just so fed up of seeing nastiness everywhere I turn at the moment. I try to keep myself away from it as much as possible now that I am not forced to spend my time with unkind people at uni or anything but it still seems to be a little bit everywhere online etc.


And I feel like it's never going to go away but that's why we all have to try and work together in looking after our own mental health and the mental health of others. Also, sorry this post was a bit of a brain dump.


What are your thoughts on this? Let's start a discussion.

HOW TO CREATE A MEDIA KIT

You might be thinking, what is a media kit and why I need one? Well, I'm here to answer these questions and give you some advice on creating one, and what to include.


What is a Media Kit?

A media kit is a document that bloggers, content creators and influencers use to show information about their platform. It's usually shared to brands so they can learn more about the creators they are working with.


Books on a shelf

If you want to work with brands, it's important to have a media kit that you can keep up to date with your stats. This way if you are emailing a brand to work with them, you don't need to send a long email about the views you receive on your blog or the engagement you get on your social posts. You can keep all this information in your media kit and attach it, such a time saver.


I used Canva to create my media kit and made sure the branding aligned with the colours I have used across my blog and social media channels to keep it all consistent. Mine is also only 3 pages because I feel like for now, that is all that's needed but yours may be more or less depending on how much information you want to put in. I would try to keep it to around 2-5 pages though, to try and be concise.


What to include

Here is a checklist of things you can include, you may wish to include more if you need to.

  1. A short bio about what your platform/blog is about.
  2. A photo of yourself.
  3. Who your main target audience is.
  4. Your blog and social media platfroms and stats - I just included followers on my socials, my blog views and blog domain authority, but you may wish to include social engagement rates too. Make sure these are up to date before you send it to brands.
  5. Brands you have worked with in the past. This is optional, if you are new to this you won't be able to add this just yet but it's just a good way to show your experience if you have it.

How to use it

The purpose of a media kit is to summarise your platform and also to pitch your brand to the person or brand you'd like to work with.


If someone asks to work with you, you can show them your media kit so they can learn more about you. Alternatively, you can email brands with your media kit and pitch to them. Pitching to work with brands is a completely separate thing, that I feel like I can't write a blog post on yet, just because I don't do it too often so I wouldn't be giving expert advice. Maybe this is one for the future when I start pitching more. 


What I will say is, it's definitely worth putting yourself out there to brands or even local venues that you'd like to work with. It has paid off for me quite a few times now.


Do you have a media kit?

LIFE UPDATE - FINISHING UNIVERSITY

Bit of a chatty one - I just thought I'd update you all on my life as I have finished university!


A few years ago, I wrote posts on applying to uni and wrote updates on how my first year was going, but since then I haven't really spoken about it that much on here.


So after 4 years of being a Communication and Media student at Bournemouth University, I have finally finished and I got a 2:1 overall with a 1st in my dissertation! I am now working as a Social Media and Communications Coordinator for the same organisation I did my internship with between second and third year.


I am so glad I went to uni it was such a good experience, obviously there were some downs but I wouldn't change it. I won't get into all of my highlights and lowlights for the year because that would take forever. Maybe I will do that when I am really missing uni but for now I just wanted to update you all.


Bournemouth university students going to summer ball

Related: Top tips for starting university


What have I learnt?


To be honest, I feel like most of the stuff I learnt was about adult life and what kind of person I am rather than academic. Obviously I did learn a lot about media too, I feel like I can never watch a film or read a newspaper article properly again without analysing every word or every scene. But reflecting back, the experiences I had will mean more to me than that kind of stuff (sorry lecturers).


It was a shame that Covid kind of got in the way a little bit of my final year but I have still been able to do lots of fun things with my friends. 2021 is definitely the year of the bottomless brunch!


Luckily, because I live an hour away from Bournemouth I can go and visit whenever I want and I will still have friends living there.


I live in a very small town where I'm never really pushed out of my comfort zone so uni really helped push me to make friends and put myself out there (usually helped by a little Dutch courage too).


Where do we go from here?


As I mentioned before, I am starting my career in social media marketing and I am really enjoying it so far. I'm really looking forward to see how my career goes too. At the moment I am still learning about it while working.


I've had a few questions about university and applying to jobs so if you want to know anything, please feel free to ask me. 

Related: 7 ways to enhance your CV

To be honest, I just can't believe uni is over it's so weird how quickly it went. I still feel the same age as when I started too, I feel like everyone says that.


It definitely feels like the end of an era but also not in some ways because I am still planning to keep in touch with all my uni pals as much as possible.