After travelling, the next most exciting thing is documenting your travels – it’s a fun and cheap way of reliving your time abroad and of course, preserving the memories in something more lasting than your newly exotic Instagram feed.
Here are a few tips I’ve picked up along the way:
Journals/Blogs: There are some travel tales that you want to share and some that you most definitely want to squash between the pages of a dog-eared diary. During my semester abroad, I blogged on a couple of platforms (WordPress is a great free blogging site, with plenty of website designs to cater for different types of travellers) so my friends and family could all keep up with what I was doing. Journals are a good idea for when you just need an emotional vent or for the less PG moments of your travels, but if the idea of keeping a daily diary seems like too much of a commitment, just write a couple of sentences to sum up the day.
World map design not obligatory, but preferable
Video diaries/Vlogs: Every time I come back from a holiday or travels, I always regret not keeping a video diary. Sewing together 20- second clips and then adding an Avicii soundtrack not only makes you feel like you’re the star of your own Z-list movie, but also really brings the foreign landscape back to life – the sounds of the street, that dance festival you stumbled across and the ever so slightly hysterical laughs of you and your friends on the 10 hour bus journey from hell.
Scrapbooking/Photo Books: For me, scrapbooking is the best way to display your photos and all the museum and train tickets you collected on the way and is also a great stressbuster as your biggest worry becomes whether to tilt that photo or trim it. It’s also a good way of telling people about a trip abroad, referring to pages of your scrapbook and being able to elaborate beyond ‘yeah it was good’. Scrapbooking my 5 months in Paris was so much fun and means I can keep all my metro tickets without them lying around collecting dust. Alternatively, photo books are basically pre-done scrapbooks where you choose your photos and any accompanying text you want and order them online – they can be quite expensive, but the glossy finish gives it a professional look and at least you can guarantee that none of the photos are going to fall out or get accidentally smeared in glue.
Bubble writing is obviously a must
Cooking: Ok, so this isn’t naturally the first thing that springs to mind when you think about documenting your trip, but hear me out. Flicking through photo albums is a way to remember your trip and get the nostalgic juices flowing, but cooking dishes that your learnt to make abroad or wanted to try out when you got home is an effective way of transporting you back to Mexico 2015 without leaving your kitchen – plus you get a little buzz when you don’t burn it and can feel all cultured and smug when you tell people you’re making Mayan Fish tacos, which you learnt to make in the Yucatan peninsula. Gap yah, yeah.
Edited by Katie Randall
Sources:
http://rebloggy.com/post/film-collage-journal-scrapbook-journalling/2949…