Travel Diary: London

Published on by LostViivi17 Comments

5 days in London is far from enough. This city is full of places to see and things to experience. However 5 days is just enough to fall in love again with the lively city. London, I will return one day and hopefully that day will be sooner than later!

Day 1: To Harrods without sleep

Our bus to the airport left 3am so I didn’t get any sleep before that. We flew with the new Finnair A350 airplane and the movie selection was too good (Now You See Me 2 is everything!!) for me to even try sleeping. My sleepless night plan however backfired right away in London… We got safely and without problems to our hotel where the staff informed us that our room would be ready in four hours. Too much time to kill for me who hadn’t slept and for my sister who just happened to be sick.

We left the hotel with a map and no plan. Our first mission was to find food and then while having mini picnic in the Hyde Park we tried to plan our afternoon. The decisions was hard because both of us just wanted to go and sleep in the hotel. In the end we decided to visit the luxurious Harrods.

Maybe not our best decision…

If you haven’t visited Harrods let me tell you it is amazing fancy shop where you would imagine rich people shopping. Fortunately there was a lot of tourists beside us so our “travel day straight from plane” styles almost fitted in the huge department store.

I have three tips for visiting Harrods:

  1. Get lost. There is no way you can find all the sections, floors and places. There is so many rooms full of stuff that it just is impossible.
  2. Visit the food/tea/sweets floor. So beautiful!
  3. Get amazed by the toys they sell. It may sound funny to recommend Harrods’ kids’ floor but it is the dream of every human. Good looking girls and boys are showing how to use the different toys. There is anything kid can hope for.

So after a while my sister started to complain she was too tired (why is she always sick when we travel together?) so we returned to the hotel and surprisingly our room was ready almost hour in advance. It was time to rest for a while.

At the evening I left my sister to sleep and went for evening walk in Hyde Park. I would walk around there forever. The funniest thing in that park are the animals (and people taking photos with them). When you approach the birds with your camera huge gang of different birds immediately come for you to find food. Scary and cool at the same time!

My nature photographer side went crazy so here is some Hyde Park photos:

 

Day 2: Super Tourists Bus Touring

What would holiday be without hop-on-hop-off bus tour? Because my sister was still sick we decided to take our first day easy and go around the city on bus. It wasn’t as easy as we tought it would be… But maybe didn’t come as surprise for you because a lot of things go like that with me.

 

In the bus company’s website it said their office is in Baddington station. Well it wasn’t. We went to the station, saw place with the bus company’s logos and went in. Then I told I want to buy the tickets but the clerk informed me we were in the wrong place. The ticket counter was outside the station “next to the subway. The fast food subway.” With those directions we found the right place.

After that we bought the tickets, tried to find the bus stop and finally our touristy day was ready to began. First stop King’s Cross Station. Or the station known for its Harry Potter 9 3/4 platform. Our first mission was to find breakfast. Sounds easy but it’s not…

We went around the station trying to find something breakfasty (can your ever say it like that?). Somehow we ended up going to Japanese place and eating huge bento boxes. It was so good! I recommend. The restaurant name was Wasabi and they had restaurants all over London. Cheap and tasty.

All those people lining up to take photo with fake platform 9 3/4.

Conveniently we were able to see the ‘Harry Potter take your own 9 3/4 platform photo here’ -place. It was our next thing to do. We waited for 20 minutes and the line hadn’t moved at all so we gave up. It was good decision because when we visited the Warner Bros. studios there was identical photography point.

So it was time to continue our bus tour. We saw many interesting buildings and drove around London. Next time we meant to drop of next to Tower of London but accidentally forgot so our next stop was London eye and Big Ben.

Nothing eventful happened here. Just us taking some photos and looking all touristy, someone playing Star Wars songs with bagpipes and a lot of polices and protesters next to the Big Ben. After getting our cool photos we took the bus and continued towards the amazing shopping paradise called Oxford street.

It was almost hour of sitting in the bus before we finally we on the right stop. At this point it has started to rain and we had to run towards the shops. The luck was on our side because we found Primark right away and were saved from the storm.

Primark was heaven. Cheap and cool clothes. I bought fake leather jacket, cozy sweater and jeans (that will cause me problems later on…) After exiting the shop with too many bags it was already dark and we were almost dead. It was time to take metro back to our hotel.

 

Coming soon…

London diary pt. 2, review of Harry Potter Warner Bros. Studio Tour and additional photo diary for all the London photos I couldn’t fit to those posts. I release new post every Friday so I will write and publish them some time soon. And to end this posts here is some London photos from my Instagram:

 

Have you ever visited London and maybe the places I went into? And are you as in love with this city as I am?

I hope you will have a good weekend!
With love,

Viivi Severina

Travel Rant: Fall in Love

Published on by LostViivi23 Comments

Don’t be scared to fall in love. And no, I’m not talking about that cute backpacker boy or the hot local guide.

Fall in love with new places, the inspiring experiences and most importantly with yourself.

After that you can hit up with all the handsome and beautiful people you meet on your travels or in life generally. This may sound corny but loving yourself first is important. Trust me I know what I’m talking about.

Being scared of life is somehow been normal feeling for me as long as I can remember. It has been easier to follow someone and make sure you will never be alone. When pushed to experience something new my survival guide used to be: find new friend, follow them everywhere like a lost puppy, a little by little get attached to them too much and in the end get lost even more.

This changed when I did my first solo travel trip year ago. I took my 20 years old self to adventure I had always dreamed about but never believed to accomplish. For the first time in my life I followed my own nose and learned how to love myself.

It’s not easy but it will happen naturally. Just keep doing what you want and don’t always listen to others. Not even if they seem to be the love of your life. Being alone seems scary but it will make your learn a lot about yourself. What do you really like?

You have a whole day ahead of you. No one to tell you where to go. Your day is full of choices and you have to make them. Will you wake up early or sleep until the noon? Do you want to eat in safe McDonald’s or try something suspicious looking local cuisine? What do you want to do with your life?

Loving yourself seems so hard. For me it has meant to like the way I look, decide my own destiny and be proud of the things I have accomplished. At the age of 20 and before I left my home to wander neither of those were true. I hated my appearance and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I was totally lost.

After I had spend some time alone and listened my own opinions there was change. I began to like the person staring me back from mirror. She wasn’t yet beautiful but something in her eyes screamed happiness and that made her perfect in my eyes. That made me love her, myself. Without even trying I had finally fallen in love with myself.

I didn’t still had direction for my life or any remarkable achievements. But I didn’t need them. Twenty years I had tried to form perfect me to fall in love with but it only took one month to realize that wasn’t what I needed. The perfect me wasn’t the one I would love.

What I am trying to say with this somehow confusing piece of my mind is to listen yourself. Love the person you are. Be with yourself before you give your soul to someone else. I have seen so many of my friends falling head over heels and then their relationships have ended because they don’t know their own self well enough.

Traveling solo is the way I figured this out and I think it is the easiest way. Alone in the country you don’t know and people speaking language you can’t understand it’s easier to get closer yourself.

Maybe I’m wrong but this is my opinion. This is how I see the world.

Share this photo!

I know I promised to publish the London travel diary today but I have been sick so here is old travel rant I wrote months ago. Suprisingly, travel rants have been quite popular posts in my blog. Also, I have the most fun writing these pieces even if they don’t make a lot of sense. So here is another travel rant and be aware that there will be even more of them in the future!

With love,

Viivi Severina

Earning Travel Money: Fiverr

Published on by LostViivi5 Comments

“Earning Travel Money: Fiverr” or maybe better said

 

My First Month In Fiverr To Earn Extra Travel Money:
What You Should And Shouldn’t Do…

 

I have been super busy lately and so had hard times having time to write blog posts. I was trying to come up with easy to write post idea when it was standing right in front of me. Big part of my busy schedule has been earning money in Fiverr. If you don’t know what this site is about you will soon find out!

What is Fiverr?

I think we have talked about this before here in my blog but Fiverr is internet site that lets you work as freelancer for anyone wanting to buy your services. Fiverr takes small part of your earnings for providing you the easy way of finding jobs.

What can you do in Fiverr?

Literally anything. I have been doing translation and blog writing but you should decide the jobs depending what you are good at. Give advises, take photographs or teach languages. I have also seen people sending post cards, cursing people or depending to be someone’s boyfriend online. Any gift you have can make money for you in Fiverr.

If you can’t come up with any gig ideas you should look ‘buyer requests’ board where anyone can search workers for their projects. I have found few interesting projects to take part from here so I can totally recommend using it.

My Tips

So now you have been introduced to the amazing world of Fiverr and I bet you want try it too. I mean who wouldn’t? Specially if you are traveller extra money is always handy. I have learned many thing in this short month so I wanted to share them with you. Enjoy this list of things you should and shouldn’t do in Fiverr:

  • Don’t expect someone to hire you just because they contacted you. I have been contacted by many people telling me about their super interesting projects. We have been talking for few days and then they stop answering to my messages. Don’t feel offended they have probably found someone more fitting for their project or someone who is cheaper than you. Or they just decided to not hire anyone.
  • Always answer for everyone. If you don’t answer in your profile “Response Rate” percents are going down. And yes you need to answer even if they say something stupid. And you need to be the one who gets last word in every conversation. For me as quiet Finn this is super hard and sometimes my response bar has been under 50%.
  • If you start to regret promising to do gig just cancel it. Same goes if you realize you can’t do what you have promised. I had one $60 dollars gig that I realized was too big and hard for me to handle. I told to the orderer that it was too much for me and then cancelled the gig. It is easy!
  • Count how long it takes to finish your gig and decide the price with that in your mind. How much is your hourly wage? I decided right away when starting Fiverr that mine would be a little under 10$. When you get better you can decide to get more money per hour.
  • Watch out for cheaters! Some people will try to cheat you and make you work without pay. Be careful and you should be okay
  • Use the ‘holiday’ mode when you are busy. When you are on holiday mode in Fiverr people can’t order from your gigs. Use this when you are too busy to work in Fiverr.
  • Be friendly and always do the works as well as you can. Even if it may seem like few euros gig isn’t worth of doing properly you never know what can come out of that small gig. People tend to first buy small gig and if you do well they will order more. So if take every work seriously there is better change of getting bigger and better paying gigs.

My First Month in Fiverr

So now you may be interested how well have I done in my first month. I have to say I was surprised by the amount of gigs I have done! 13 gigs and earned $200 in my first month. It has taken me approximately 20 hours of work and too many cups of tea.

My first gig was translating product descriptions and made me totally anxious. I know I can write well in Finnish and I know I am fluent in reading English however I had never done any translation work. Surprisingly the client liked my translation. I got four stars out of five (because few compound mistakes with the product names) and new order from them.

After that first gig I have only got five stars out of five stars review and positive feed back out of my translations. Apparently I am quite good at it, who would have guessed! So my first month went mostly doing translations and getting better and quicker at it. In the end of September I saw someone searching for Finnish travel blog writer and I got my first article writing job. And apparently I am quite good at that too!

Right now during my second month I have done more article writing, longer translations and archived level two as seller. So I could say I’m totally hooked to Fiverr.

 

Do you have any experiences from Fiverr? Or other sites like it? I’m always happy to hear your stories and experiences!

So today I had to break off from my Friday posting schedule because we returned from London yesterday. Guess what that means! Next Friday you will get travel diary from my trip to London. If you want to have sneak peek to what I did check out my INSTAGRAM photos.

With love

Viivi Severina

 

Photo Diary: Finnish Forest

Published on by LostViivi20 Comments

Today’s Fearless Travel Friday (am I really naming this like that?) has subject that’s close to my heart. Today I am going to present photo diary from last spring. And this is not just any travel diary… The destination was Finnish forest, the place I feel most peaceful and safe.

The sun was shining (well, not really it was quite cloudy…) and all the snow had melted so I wanted to go for small getaway with my dog. After Finland’s long winter I always yearn for green forests and quiet peaceful walks in middle of nowhere. So I got my dog, hiking books and headed towards the closest national park called Seitseminen.

Someone wasn’t as thrilled about this trip to forest as I was…

I have visited Seitseminen million times but this was my first time driving there by myself so of course I got lost. What I didn’t know at that point was how wrong this small trip would go. Like usually everything I screwed I everything and all the possible things were against me getting nice travel experience.

When I finally found the park I though my perfect day would start. The first thing I had to do was get map from the park’s information center. Because you can’t take dogs inside I decided to leave her for a moment inside the car. Between me and the information was huge hill that was full of slippery ice. (I had though all snow had already melted how the heck was there ice?!?)

So I almost crawled on my knees up the hill. I had just done my small victory dance when loud alarm startled me. My dog had somehow set off the car’s alarm system. Now between me and the embarrassingly loud car was that same icy hill. I tried to go down carefully but ended up falling down and sliding down on my butt.

After shutting down the alarm, walking up the hill with my dog and finding place for my dog to wait outside I felt like winner. Nothing else would go wrong with this trip! Well at least I though so…

Going to the information center was totally embarrassing because I was probably the only visitor in whole park at that time. The nice person helping me totally knew that I was behind the earlier loud alarm. She also looked me oddly when I realized (and lightly panicked) that I had forgot my snacks and water bottle. But even if I seemed like total dork I get map and was finally able to leave to the forest.

It took me few seconds to realize that in fact it wasn’t yet spring but rather winter in the forest. There snow and ice everywhere, I didn’t have enough clothes and it was almost impossible to take photos and hold my super exited dog at the same time. I could have turned around but giving up has never been part of my personality. With insane bravery I walked deeper in to the green darkness.

After walking a while I found the quietness and peace I came for. Few birds were singing and I felt like this was my home. This was the place I had missed every time I went abroad. I don’t have words to describe the rest of my walk. Perfect, refreshing, everything I needed in my stressful life.

Then after walking for good five kilometers (falling over every now and then because of the ice) I came to the end of the forest path. In front of me was yet another icy rise to climb. Of course I sprained my ankle… Well I was able to drive back home (not safe to do that so please don’t follow my example!) and never mentioned my not so successful trip.

There is one more funny thing in this trip. It is part of the reason that I started writing this blog more seriously. The thing is there was this ‘summer job’ in Finland for blogger and I tried to apply for it and my blogging subject was this trip. Like you see I didn’t get the place but like usually when I’m rejected I want to show everyone that I can do it.

The rest is history! Well not history but during juny and july I got over 500 readers for my own travel blog even if I didn’t write everyday like in the job I would have done. I know those people who didn’t hire will never know what they missed when not taking me in but I feel quite good about that. And nowadays I would not imagine my life without blogging.

So thank you for reading my blog! And not judging me even if some of the posts are super boring stuff like this. Thank you!

This is how my super lazy companion tried to hide from me after our trip. Don’t worry she is only playing angry and in reality we both love our forest adventures like nothing else.

I hope you enjoyed today’s post. Next week I will be on London so I’m not yet sure if I have time to write post for Friday.

By the way does anyone have tips for me what to do in London? I’m going with me sister and we have both been there before so we are trying to come up with something fun to do. Any suggestions are appreciated!

I hope you will have amazing weekend!
With love,

Viivi Severina

Travel Rant: Being Scared of Taxis

Published on by LostViivi12 Comments

I’m going to start this post with confession:

I’m scared of taxis!

I know this sounds crazy for some of you so let me explain a little bit before we start. In Finland we don’t really use taxis that much. It’s more something older or drunk people do. So I have driven taxi in my home country only for few times. Because of that I haven’t been very eager to use taxis in foreigner countries.

I never planned to talk about this insane fear of mine. Well at least not until I got email from company named Ride.Guru. You see the closer I have come to my one thousand readers the more I have started to get emails from different brands. I read all of those messages and see if there is any I want to introduce for you.

Ride.Guru was the first one that caught my eye enough to make me mention them for you (and no this is not paid post. I just really fell in love with their idea!) I think because of them I will more confidently use taxis starting from now on. And their ‘ask the guru‘ section has already helped me to get know more about the “new things” like Uber and Lyft. I may soon be there asking too many questions…

However today we talk about my experiences using taxis while traveling and why my fears are quite insane (like fears usually are…)

So my main reason for being scared of taxis is the price. How the heck can you know what will the ride cost?!? Using taxi seems expensive even if in some countries it may be cheaper and easier than public transportation. And it also is safer than using metro or bus at night time (especially for solo travellers).

For example taking taxi from Paris’ airport to our accommodation with my family was much cheaper than using train. The whole taxi ride I was in fear of huge bill but got happily surprised when it didn’t cost almost anything. Before our trip I had tried to find how much it would cost from different internet sites and forums but found nothing.

Another fear of mine is how to get taxi. Should I call or wave my hand around for all taxis on street? Well I can say now with some experience that this depends on where you are. Getting taxi from airport is easy. Getting taxi somewhere else is super scary (or is it just me?)

Apparently it isn’t as hard as I am imagining… Nowadays you can just use apps like Uber or websites or whatever to get taxi for yourself. And now when I can search from net the prices I think I can start using taxis more. Maybe even on my trip to London next week! I will update you later on if I did or did not have courage to try taxi travel in London.

Do you have any insane fears with transportation like I do? Or am I only one fearing taxi rides? And also if you have any good websites to recommend like Ride.Guru I recommend for you just mention them in comments. I’m always trying to find new places to research for my travels.

I hope you are doing well.
With love,

Viivi Severina