Power-Puff Hitchhikers?

Enjoy meeting new people? Fancy a trip around Europe for free? Then you’re only a Power-Puff girl costume and a good cause away from doing both!

Nineteen year-old Warwick University student, Bhavik Patel is taking part in the university’s own annual charity event known as ‘Jailbreak’, which entails travelling as far away from the university campus as possible, without spending a penny.

Bhavik is keen to get on with the challenge and said: “The jailbreak event starts on the 5th and ends on the 6th (of November), we have 36 hours to get as far from our university as we can without spending any money.” The Charity behind the event is called Practical Action, an international development charity that helps to alleviate poverty in the developing world through the innovative use of technology. “They are usually underpinned by bigger names, for example UNICEF” explained Bhavik.

The student’s plan is go (along with two of his friends) dressed as Power-Puff girls – an interesting prospect, but an idea Bhavik thinks will put him and his friends in good stead for the trip: “When you’re out looking to hitchhike you need to be seen, three guys dressed as power-puff girls catches anyone’s eye. Last year we went as Robin and Batman, it worked pretty well, people looked at us simply out of curiosity and we were holding signs saying we were hitchhiking for charity, at times people approached us asking if they could be of any use. This year we’ll probably stand out even more.”

The main rules of the event are to not spend any money on travel, and what’s known as the ‘ultimate challenge’ involves not spending any money on anything such as food, accommodation etc. “We completed the ultimate challenge last year, surprisingly people gave a lot of food and drink, we usually slept in 24 hour petrol stations. Getting back is a lot harder since you’re looking to hitchhike to a specific spot, we ended up having to get a coach as my partner had a exam – we paid ourselves wasn’t too bad 30 quid each, a bargain for the time we had” Bhavik said.

Having done this charity even for a number of years now, students try to better previous student’s attempts every year, which provides a competitive side to event, making it a more desirable event to take part in. Bhavik explained: “The current record is someone managed to get to Thailand, another person managed to get all the way to New York as well. This year we’re hoping to either get to Amsterdam or head south to Spain or Italy. We will definitely make it out of the country.”

Being experienced in this kind of charity trip after making it all the way to Germany last year, Bhavik is optimistic about the trip and feels as though he has an edge of the other students because of this. “Last year we raised over £30, 000.00 for UNICEF who used the money to help victims of the flooding in Asia at the time. There were many insane moments last year, we managed to ride in a DB9, which was a highlight, there were also low points, on the way back a crazy German couple decided to stop in the middle of the motorway and kick us out because they were heading in another direction. We had to run off the motorway and walk for miles to get into the next smallest town” Said Bhavik.

Bhavik also explained to me how vital the costumes were in their attempt to travel across Europe as well as the ability to be persuasive and give off the impression that you are a safe person; “you only get a few seconds to convince a stranger to give you a lift, so you need to make those precious few moments count. You need to sound like a safe, nice person and obviously mention your doing this for charity. Another tip I learnt was as soon as people make eye contact with you – approach them, between us we got about 70 euros of food, and a lot of drink including alcohol to make those long hours waiting a lot more entertaining.”

Bhavik also revealed a few more hints and tips he used and suggested would be useful for anybody planning on travelling round the world on a tight budget. He said “Wearing the outfits that we were wearing, people approached us naturally just wondering what we were doing. My partner knows quite a few languages, a great asset, but for those languages we couldn’t speak we had a book which had a message saying what we were doing for charity and asking for whatever help people could spare. Quite a few people made donations once they read that, either in money or giving us a meal or drink.”

News and Magazine Production – Blog 1

It’s the start of the second year on our journalism course and as part of the News and Magazine Production module we’ve been asked to organise ourselves into groups and come up with an idea for a magazine. Our group decided on creating a travel magazine, for those looking to travel on a tight budget ( students, post grads). At first I wasn’t sure I would know enough about travelling to write much in the magazine but since doing my first feature (about a charity event involving travelling for free) I have become more enthusiastic about the magazine concept and I am looking forward to progressing with the group. I believe the design stages of the magazine will be pivotal to the success of the magazine, as the aesthetics will be what (hypothetically) sells the magazine.

I am looking forward to writing about cheap travel as it is not an area that I have persued an interest or have written about before. However, I am fond of the concept, and so I believe that this interest will motivate me to work hard and to enjoy my work. I am also looking forward to working with my team as they are close friends of mine, but are also hard-working and easy to communicate with. I believe good communication will be pivotal to creating a successful magazine.

Falmouth Night Club to be Closed

A Falmouth night club is due to be closed on the 28th May according to an online forum.

Shades nightclub situated by Falmouth harbour had been subject to arguments from last year, as near-by residents complained about noise at unsocial hours as well as ‘urine and vomit’, read an online Cornwall news report.

The nightclub was in jeopardy of closing down in the past year, as the owner Matthew Cudlipp was asked to go to court over an issue involving copyrighted songs being played at the club without a license.

According to an online ‘thisiscornwall.com’ report, Mark Hitchens, from Cornwall Council’s environmental protection department said: “”The department has received a large number of complaints about this premises since 2007 regarding the noise created by customers as they queue to get into the club, gather outside to smoke and as they leave.

“There is no evidence that the management of the club are even attempting to address this issue despite warnings from officers.”

An event was posted on facebook titled ‘SHADES NIGHTCLUB CLOSING DOWN’ which has claimed that there will be a closing down party at the Shades nightclub on the 28th May.

Written on the facebook event page are details of the party including ‘FREE drinks all night long’ and ‘ £10,000 stock to give away for free.’

However, on the event page the event administrator explained that the closing party would not take place at Shades due to the police ‘stopping the night from going ahead’.

The Falmouth police replied to this comment via their facebook page and explained that ‘We are not trying to stop this event as long as it goes ahead legally and safely. Please get in touch to discuss a licence and conditions for the event and venue.’

Social Networking: How Social is Our Networking?

Friends, tweets, pokes and birthdays have all become a thing of the past thanks to social networking. Friends used to be people you knew and spent time with, you used to be able to hear birds tweet as you woke; a poke was once a physical annoyance, and a birthday was an occasion of celebration.

However, thanks to web 2.0 and the rise of the social network these things have all transformed from physical, meaningful parts of our lives to mere everyday occurrences and quantities. But how much do these things still mean to us?

People nowadays say things such as ‘I have five hundred and forty friends’ and ‘have you only got two followers?’ rather than such classics as ‘I have friends’ and ‘stop following me’. After reading back the latter, the change it represents seems ludicrous as something such as being followed has changed from something undesirable to something desirable – one could question the choice of the word ‘follower’ because of its meaning being more associated with the word ‘stalker’.

However, people seem to have become accustomed to these news meanings very quickly, to be factually correct over eight-hundred million people, as more and more people join the Twitter and Facebook networks. So surely a site such as Facebook with a user population of about six-hundred million people can only act as a sort of web-based playground for social interaction?

In contrast, social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter are often associated with narcissism, which is a contradictory argument to the idea of hundreds of people socialising together online. In this argument, people generally tend to suggest that users utilise websites as a tool for narcissistic behaviour, with the focus largely on themselves. This idea is much more feasible with the use of Facebook as each user has their own profile with a picture, information and wall for comments.

19 year-old Mary Theobold from Southampton suggested that some people are narcissistic in their use of Facebook in particular; she said: “some people use it to chat to people and probably to show off their lives a bit too… such as ‘look how amazing my party was last night we took so many photos we didn’t have time to actually party”.

Twitter on the other hand is largely used for a collection of very short posts as it is limited to only 140 characters per tweet. However, some users are known to constantly tweet hundreds of times a-day, consequently filling up people’s home pages and forcing them to be un-followed (a tragic punishment for some). Twitter is largely based on news and gossip and is probably better described as an information feed, as users can choose the profiles they wish to receive tweets from. This is an effective tool for internet users in general, as they are able to filter out the specific information they wish to receive, and thus creating their own niche feed.

The social networking element begins when people decide to share the information they receive by re-tweeting it back into the news feed of their followers. This process however can easily be likened to the twenty-first century term ‘churnalism’ where old information is regurgitated and re-published. Has this regurgitation become the new form of social networking?  19 year-old Journalism student Simon Poynter said: “It’s all about news on twitter. BBC breaking news and links to Guardian stories, and keeping up to the minute on big events, like following journalists who were at the student protests. I don’t use it socially, not at all.”

Becks Fusion – Beer of the Summer?

Summer is coming, and with summer comes fun, excitement, gigs and holidays. But for a Falmouth student, what is summer without the three B’s? Beach, Barbecue and especially Beer!

Alcohol is apparent in a range of shapes and forms, but I believe I have found the perfect alcoholic summer beverage, Becks Fusion.

This ‘Limited Edition’ beer has only recently appeared on supermarket shelves and it is claimed on the bottles to have a ‘hint of orange zest flavour’ to match the bottle’s bronze foil decoration.

As a student, I understand the difference between a good cheap beer, and a bad cheap beer (with emphasis on the cheap).

At first I was sceptical, and wondered whether fruit and beer could actually prove to be a good tasting alcoholic drink, especially at this hot time of year.

After taking my first sip from a bottle of Becks Fusion, I was instantly surprised.

For only £4.50 for 6 bottles of Becks Fusion, I have found a winner and with all the recent hype about binge drinking and the cost of alcohol being so low, this drink is sold in 4% bottles and its flavour makes for a more casual summer drink than most other standard lagers.

Becks has managed to perfectly fuse the sweet and zesty orange taste with the refreshing taste of Becks beer, something that hasn’t recently been attempted by otherUKbeer brands.

With the first bottle it is easy to liken the taste to that of a becks top, a standard pint of Becks topped up with some lemonade, but after gaining a real taste for the product it is clear that Becks Fusion really does have a unique flavour.

This in my opinion, crowns it beer of the summer.