OUGD502 / Study Task / Summer

Over this summer I worked in 4 different cafe's over all, as well as going to 3 festivals. The most influential experience I had was travelling to Croatia with my friends to go to Outlook festival. The festival was in Pula and we camped right by the beach. As it's the biggest festival in Europe people from all around the world were there and we made friends with and camped with people from Perth in Australia, Paris and some people from Devon, London and Chester, all of which I am still in contact with now and hope to meet up with or even camp with again next year.

I found it really interesting hearing about life in Australia and Paris, as well as hearing how they perceived life in England. We were all camping together so we ended up forming a big group, it was really exciting to be with all these different people from different places, having the one thing in common that we had all travelled there to go to the festival. When talking to a guy from Paris we talked about how I thought the English are generally more reserved than people abroad, which is why I'd like to live abroad when I'm older, however he disagreed and argued that in England people dress so much more outgoing and have pink hair and tattoos, whereas a lot of places abroad are a lot more conservative. I never thought about this much but when thinking about it the people at English festivals are dressed up very outgoing with glitter everywhere and wigs, whereas at Outlook it was generally a lot more relaxed (partly because of how hot it was). Possibly the British culture is more into their appearance? 

One of the peaks of the festival was actually outside of Outlook. By word of mouth we had heard about a lighthouse, which was outside of the festival, we had to swim round the side of the beach while no security was looking, I was with a friend who I had just met that week. We had to walk through wooded rocky areas in bare feet and just as we'd been walking for about 15 minutes we came to an opening. There was a massive bridge which looked like it could break with big gaps in so you had to be careful when crossing or you'd fall in the water, there were a lot of people and they'd set up little areas to sit with hammocks, there was music, drinks, people were diving of the rocks and there obviously the lighthouse. It was so fun discovering this little place and the fact we didn't have any cameras on us or anything made us appreciate the experience more as we could only keep the memory in our heads. 

Going on all these experiences with new and different people in a different country was really exciting and made me realise how much I want to travel or and live in lots of different places in my life to experience different cultures, people and places.