Since landing back in the UK from Portugal, my time has been pretty much just dedicated to university work, with a multitude of deadlines bunched together, including a draft copy of my dissertation. In between the madness however I have managed to do the odd fun thing, the most important being catching up with Thuy, who I worked with in Spain!
First up Thuy was roaming around the north of the country as part of her new London-based job, and so we were able to meet up in Leeds for a catch up over some Belgrave pizza and a G&T, and go on a shopping and eating tour of Leeds the next day before she had to Leeds. Here we are roaming around Victoria Arcade…
Just last week, and in another flashback to life in Spain, I decided to try my hand at preparing a few small dishes of different types of food for one of my friends who swang by for a movie evening. I managed the spread that you can see below, which is a small miracle given the equally small size of our kitchen!
Just this Wednesday it was time to go and see Thuy again, this time in her new stomping ground, London! Having not been in a while, I boarded the train and killed some time once I arrived by paying a visit to the Design Museum, which was much grander than I expected…
I had a good snoop around all the exhibitions upstairs, taking photos for project inspiration and just enjoying the general public who’d come to learn a bit more about the work of designers – speak of which, I’m very excited for Netflix’s new documentary, Abstract: The Art of Design. I’ll be prompting you all to take a nosey at the Graphic Design episode once it’s released!
Once I’d exhausted myself flicking through books in the gift shop, and payed a customary trip to the Lush shop on Oxford Street, I headed through the very British dismal weather to go and meet Thuy as she finished work.
Soon or later I’d found Thuy’s office, and to my joy I was welcomed in for a quick snoop around – it was lovely! We then set about more important things, namely finding somewhere for a drink and a catch up, and we soon wound up having pizza by Covent Gardens and wandering down the Thames enjoying the nighttime lights of the city.
We finished up our day in a mini pub on a terrace in Covent Gardens, where we continued our chatting way into the evening, or until I had to head back to King’s Cross to catch my pretty much empty train back up to Leeds. It has been so lovely to be able to see Thuy a couple of times after what feels like ages – and now we’ve crossed paths in three cities!
In other news I’m about to head off with the UGRL Scholars for a Cultural Capital Weekend in York, after which I shall be sure to report back once more with anecdotes from the couple of days worth of cultural exploration. I am also continuing work at full tilt for the launch of my new website (including an updated blog design), with my good friend Kevin lending a hand with the Spanish translations for the relaunch of the Spanish site which has just gone down ready for the new one.
Other than that I must bid you all farewell, as I have cake to eat and washing to dry!
So in another one of our January galavants, which last time took us to Copenhagen and Stockholm, me and Izzy once again boarded a plane for a few days in another European capital – this time, Lisbon. Beginning with a decidedly relaxed morning of eating breakfast at Layne’s and heading on a train to Manchester Airport, we were soon aboard the Lisbon Metro, full of croissant and map in hand.
Emerging from the decidedly deep tunnels of the subterranean railway, we were quickly in our hostel room and ready for a good night’s sleep before the tour planned for the next morning at 10am – but as luck would have it the tour began right outside our hostel, and so the following morning we rolled out of bed to have breakfast and head to the meeting point as late as we could.
We were soon traversing the centre of the Portuguese capital, learning about invaders, explorers and the earthquake which changed the landscape of the city forever. Above you can see a portion of one of the few central buildings which survived the quake, an old church, but we were soon exploring some of the streets rebuilt after the disaster.
Soon we were ushered onto the plaza of what seemed like it was a restaurant, but was actually the entrance to an elevador, a raised platform with views overlooking the city. This metal structure, previously used to haul goods up the steep sloping ruas of the city, was a lovely spot to take a photo of the city’s topography.
A little further down the street we stopped for more information on the history of Lisbon, and were presented with an amazing view of the winding street and city beyond into which we were about to descend, from where we then got a view of the platform we’d just been up on – it was surprising how quickly we’d descended so far!
This may be one of my favourite views in Lisbon; it left me well and truly enamoured with the city.
From here we moved through the gridded and relatively recent centre of the city, rebuilt on quake proof foundations by one single architect, and to the Praça do Comércio, a square on the waterfront which sits by the governmental buildings.
Here the story of how the Portuguese people rose up and overthrew their dictator without a single life being lost was told, a movement which centred around a march on the square, and a movement which was started by the public radio transmission of a song previously banned for years – a song which it turns out is beautiful and you should give it a listen.
This square was also where the tour ended, but we had plenty more in mind which we wanted to do, so from here we moved west to a food market and then hopped on a train to explore something we had read about before leaving…
From the market, and with a stomach full of delicious croquets and freshly fried crisps, we headed to a train station to head even further east to the big San Francisco-esque suspension bridge called the Ponte 25 de Abril. Carless, we weren’t interested in crossing the huge structure, but rather an abandoned factory complex just by it which has been converted into a lovely collection of artists studios, cafés, bookstores and all other things creative.
Once inside the LX Factory, as the complex is called, we began our explorations. We nipped in and out of various little shops, before winding our way into a book shop where we browsed for a while until we found a huge printing press, where we were approached by a man asking us if we spoke English…
Having ascertained our mother tongue, the old man took us on a whirlwind tour of a huge set of crazy moving machines that he has spent his life making, from a miniature model of the printing press to oversized insects made of umbrellas and bits of desk chairs. The guy’s passion and the intricacy of the models was impressive – I don’t know if anything like that will ever happen to me again!
After explaining how he liked to make useless things, and that the most useless fan-type machine he ever made he christened “love”, we moved on as the sun began to set, exploring the last few shops in LX Factory before we left. Amongst them we found proof that Adam and Steve were a thing, and were mooned by a delinquent piece of acrylic climbing the wall of the building, all before heading back to the train station.
Waiting for the train in the setting sun made for some great lighting for a cheeky selfie and a photo looking back to the centre of Lisbon, upon arrival to which we headed out to a tiny local restaurant. Here the menu was brought to our table on a huge chalkboard, and the plates were all as delicious as each other as they were delivered one by one to our table – however we were too busy munching to take any photos. Damnit.
The next day we were once again up bright and early, this time to head out solo to the west of the city in search of the oldest part of the city, Alfama, which survived the 1755 quake due to it’s position on a separate rock of land. After a wander down the front we soon found Alfama’s winding narrow streets and precariously steep steps, but the climbing and stumbling was worth it for the views and character of the old town.
As we climbed further up Alfama we began to be able to peek out over the area, with spectacular views from plateaus along the route. We soon levelled out and decided to find a spot to get a fresh lemonade and a bite to eat, and wound up having some fresh bruschetta and basil-infused lemonade with views over a huge church that we didn’t even realise existed until we turned a corner and it presented itself to us!
We then began to circle said big church to try and find the entrance, which we pretty much had to do a full circle for, but as we discovered that there was an entry fee and our budget was tight, we decided to give it a miss and head on up the hill to a spot where we’d been told we’d find the best views over the city.
Soon we were walking up yet another steep Lisbon street, even though I didn’t think there was chance we could rise any further. The exhaustion was worth it though, for at the top we were greeted with near 360° views over the city.
What goes up however must come down, and so soon we were hugging the railing for dear life as we stumbled down a sheer flight of stairs, but the slipping and sliding was worth it for yet another stunning view of the urban scene below.
The steep ruas of the city did no favours for me and my bad balance.
The trend of stumbling across steep ruas which seem to slope down beautifully lined streets was common as we continued to traverse Lisboa, and after stopping for some famous pastel de nata (sweet custard tarts) and then a glass of wine and a sandwich, we found plenty more.
From here we had decided to try and grab one of the infamous Lisbon trams, but seeing as all the information was in Portuguese and we’d had a glass of wine, we thought it best just to wander our way back down to the hostel before heading back out for some food for the evening. This worked in our favour, however, as we found a gorgeous plaza with views over the other side of the city, just as the sun had set enough to cast a lovely light over the scene.
Whilst up here we stopped at a little kiosk to try the locally-recommended ginjinha, a Portuguese liquor made with alcohol, cherries and sugar – all served in a mini chocolate cup. It is as delicious as it sounds and I just had to pick myself a bottle of it up from duty free! Anyway, back on with the trip…
That evening we headed for another lovely meal down in the south of the city, just a few streets from the water, and once again tucked into a plate of perfectly seasoned fish. We then had to climb one of the steep streets I had christened “the hill of death” back up to the hostel for the night, after which we began the next day back on a train – this time east towards Belém.
As we arrived in Belém we couldn’t really see all that much except a car museum, but we soon found our way towards the centre. It turns out that Belém is the birthplace of the iconic custard tarts that we were snacking on all over the place, with the oldest operating bakery enjoying lines spilling out of the door – all for the small sweet treat. We decided to skip the queue and instead head further into the district, where beautiful buildings and gardens greeted us.
Traversing these, we were ambushed by some ducks (not really, but they were not perturbed by us at all), and then found our way to the huge monument to the Portuguese explorers, an impressive monolith hanging over the water’s edge. By this we were also treated to stunning views across the bay, the impressive bridge and a miniature version of the Christ The Redeemer statue that the Portuguese have built to watch over Lisbon.
From here we headed to settle in the sun, which by this point was quite warm, and so with custard tarts and coffees in hand we popped ourself down on a patch of grass under a tree and soaked up some of the warmth from the sun. I haven’t mentioned this thus far but Lisbon in January is cold – despite how lovely it may look!
Once we’d warmed up like a couple of cold-blooded lizards arching into the sun, we did a bit of Google exploration and discovered that a local museum had a free exhibition with a tonne of 20th century peices from some of the biggest names, and so we wandered back down the waterfront and headed inside the Museu Coleção Berardo.
Once inside we were in for a treat, as we found pieces from big names like Andy Warhol to personal favourites of mine like Dan Flavin, whose work I saw in London a few years ago. Here’s a couple of image highlights…
Self-described and self-defined, Joseph Kosuth, 1945Collection of 60 Drawings, Allan McCollum, 1990
After this we headed to a funnily named café called Pão Pão Queijo Queijo, literally “Bread Bread Cheese Cheese”, where we wound up stuffed after a couple of huge sandwiches, and we headed back to the hostel on the train ready for a night visiting the bars of Barrio Alto, an evening district just north of our hostel.
On our last day we spent the morning checking out of our hostel, but had some hours to kill so we headed into the city, where we descended whilst munching custard tarts with fresh orange juice, and then when it came time to head back uphill, we finally resolved to give one of the trams a try. We opted for a type called an elevador, as we couldn’t get lost on it – these trams go forwards and backwards up and down the same hill all day.
This took us to the same plaza where we’d enjoyed evening views of the city just two days before, but instead of stopping for more ginjinha we opted for a coffee and a snack to keep us going – we were wearing tired of the city’s hills!
On the way to the hostel, however, we stumbled upon an absolute gem of a museum, the MUDE, or Museu Do Design E Da Moda – The Design & Fashion Museum. What we’d found though was everything I love rolled up into one exhibition – graphic design, lighting and typography – an exhibition on the signage of Lisbon – including a look at the neon signs of bygone years.
The collection was absolutely amazing, and we were shocked when we learned that the entry was free. We had such a wonderful time exploring this unexpected find, which is deserving of and will get its own blog post at some point. Sooner or later though, we’d started at the flickering neon as much as we could, and grabbed one last custard tart and coffee before heading back to check out of the hostel and bundle our weary bodies back onto the Metro. Cut to ten hours later and we’d be on a train from Manchester Airport to Leeds too tired to speak, but we both had an amazing time!
Looking back over our four days I feel we spent just the right amount of time to enjoy a bit of everything that Lisbon has to offer – the food, the nightlife, the exhibitions, and the countless hours spent wandering the streets looking for snacks and little shops. I’d definitely recommend anyone thinking of going do so as soon as possible, it really is an amazing city – just pass on this one if you’re not a fan of custard tarts or you’ve not got very resilient calf muscles…
Hello all and happy 2017! I come to you after what has been quite a quiet festive period, as I fell quite ill with a nasty viral infection which saw me in and out of various doctors’ offices over the holidays. I’m happy to report that I am well on the road to recovery now, however, and as such have been knuckling down to getting on with something productive – my new website.
As you may recall in this post from many weeks ago, I have slowly been chipping away at the challenge of re-designing, re-coding and re-launching my website for a while now, but with my early January self-imposed deadline looming and the burst of energy as I recover, I have been really pushing to get it near completion over these past few days.
After plenty of fiddling with different types of elements which form the basic toolkit of constituent blocks which I’ll use to build each page of the new site, I finally settled on a curated array which I have been busily coding away such that they all work on all eleven possible screen width settings for the new site – to give you an idea of how much work this involves, my current site only has three possible screen width profiles and it took the best part of a month’s work.
It’s proving to be a gruelling challenge, not made any easier by the knowledge that my least-favourite task is being saved to last – defining the margins (basically the spacing between two different elements). It might sound like an easy task but I am so fussy about how everything looks that I will have to specify every element’s interaction with every other element – and then do this eleven times for each different width profile. My current estimate is that this means I will have to define a grand total of about 4,400 individual values – and that’s probably a generously low estimate.
Anyway, as someone who’s been kind enough to come along to see this blog post and has made it this far into what is probably turning out to be an Ollie vs. HTML/CSS battle rant, I have decided to share with you the link to a beta copy of where I am with coding the various elements of the new site.
For those of you unfamiliar with the term, a beta is a highly unpolished and nowhere near finished work-in-progress version of a website – so don’t be expecting anything beautiful. The page at the time of writing is basically a dummy page of all the different possible elements with horizontal lines between them – however if something seems to be showing up dramatically wrong then please drop me an email here and let me know – hopefully we can catch any bugs before I move on towards launching the site.
Anyway, if you fancy a little snoop you can do so at this link, which may occasionally go down as I make changes. Also don’t click on anything – even the buttons at the top of the page – the links are all dead. Well, here’s hoping I’m soon done so that you can explore my fancy new (working) website!
I come to you to promise the above, that I have indeed made it through my first semester of my final year of university relatively unscathed. I apologise for the severe delay in blog posts, but a quick-fire set of deadlines after my first project and as I entered the second half of the semester meant that my free time has been very limited, and so when it does come along I’ve been spending it out of the house doing as much fun stuff as I can! But this all does indeed mean that I can share just a little bit of it with you guys now…
First up, as a post-deadline treat after my first project, I headed out with some friends to go and see the hilarious Trixie Mattel perform live in Leeds, and what a great night we had! Trixie was hilarious and the time I didn’t spend laughing at her act was spent admiring the sheer scale and rigidity of her wig…
At home, whilst not buried under a mountain of sketchbooks and pens working away on a YCN brief for uni, I made the time to crack out my box of tinsel and fairy lights and get my room looking a little more festive for the period. To do this I managed to wire the fairy lights into the existing wireless lighting system in my room, and cleared my little display of tidbits off the table below my window to create my own festive snow-scene display…
Although moving from my uni room and onto campus and back again in order to work becomes as laborious and boring as it is to read, the winter weather (when not biting our fingers off with the chill) has provided some beautiful scenes here in the city, including a gloriously colourful sunset on campus which rewarded us for working late one evening…
Also, as regular readers may have guessed, I also dedicated a chunk of my free time to eating, making a lovely trip back to Lupe’s Cantina, arguably the best Mexican food in Leeds, after which some fog rolled in and made Hyde Park look quite like the moody Yorkshire one might find on a postcard.
Over the past few weeks though, and as I am sure I have mentioned multiple times thus far, the overarching matter has been the job of getting my designs for my second project wrapped up, printed off and handed in. This project will soon land on my portfolio, so I shan’t divulge too many details just yet, but I can reveal that what I ended up making left my room in a flood of paper and other craft stuff…
Sooner or later though I had my final document handed in, then a proposal written for my independent project brief which will be completed next year, and finally it was time to relax. We all made our way straight to Belgrave to share some huge trays of chips and hand out our Secret Santa gifts, during which Rhea presented me with a huge bag full of hilarious goodies!
And so after that whirlwind overview of the past month or so, we hit today. Just this past week I’ve been suffering quite a bit from some kind of viral infection plus a wisdom tooth intent on causing me never-ending pain, so me and Izzy have been taking it easy and chilling in the house. I’m very much looking forward to Christmas but I don’t think the real excitement is going to hit properly until I land back in Burnley this weekend – leaving it late or what?!
As mentioned in a blog post from the beginning of this year, it’s been quite a while since I launched my blog and then my website, with myblog now over three years old and the rest of website marching towards it’s second anniversary!
That blog post outlined a few interesting things which had happened up until that point, and now with six months of professional experience working out in Madrid with the wonderful Erretres under my belt and various other projects ongoing or completed, I’ve decided to start actually devoting some time to the redesign of my website which was mentioned in that post from months gone by.
As the most visited part of my website, I have naturally started things off by evaluating my blog. The green on this section has now gone, and the grey background has been replaced by a purer, fully white design, with nothing but the very occasional subtle shadow to create depth and separation. The typeface for the main text within the post has had a facelift, with a wider, more modern font now in use, and a new feature menu makes better use of the screen space available on modern devices.
You’ll also(finally) be able to click on images to expand them for more detail, and there’s a few other hidden interactions that you’ll be able to make – and even further future ones which I’m toying with for the time being…
The new design will initially appear very familiar to those reading my blog on their desktops, and this is a consciencous decision – I am quite happy with most aspects of my current website and so want to keep the familiarity and simplicity as intact as I can, especially within the blog section. More major changes will be occurring within other areas of the site, one of which can be seen in the menu as “Portfolio” will become “Projects”, to allow for a wider scope of cool stuff that I want to get posted on here in the future.
If you’ve any feedback please be sure to drop me a comment on my Facebook Page, privately via email or even in person if you’re unlucky enough to see me in the flesh from time to time! Until then I’ll be working on more exciting updates ready to begin the construction of this behemoth change – I’m hoping for a launch before the end of the year but we’ll have to see how cruel HTML can be…
