by Jonny | Apr 9, 2013 | Tips & Advice, Travel
Recently, I’ve been looking for cheap flights to London from Taipei and the cheapest airline that I’ve found is China Eastern Airlines.
Of course, there does come a price when choosing a cheap airline and this particular flight’s price is that it will take 32 hours to get to London. It stops over at Shanghai and from Shanghai it’ll take me back to London. The total cost of the flight including taxes comes to NT$12,848, which is pretty cheap considering my sister paid almost NT$25,000 when comparing my flight with hers.
Although, altogether she paid NT$47,000 and that included return and she also flew with Cathay Pacific, who are arguably Taiwan’s premium airline, along side Eva Air.
China Eastern Airlines (Click to make bigger)
I was actually a little ignorant about flight costs before looking this up, and I used the China Eastern Airlines website to find this ticket, but when looking up the prices, it didn’t include the tax costs.
So, I was thinking my flight would only cost NT$9,000, but when I started filling my information in and when I clicked onto the next page, it showed me the extra tax costs which amount to NT$3,848. In total, as you can see from the above picture, my flight will cost NT$12,848. – That still isn’t a bad price, at-all. I looked up Malaysia Airlines and their cheapest cost is NT$19,000 (inc. taxes), which is even more pricier than China Eastern Airlines by quite a bit. I just hope there are no hidden surprises with China Eastern Airlines.
I’m currently living in Taiwan and working as just an assistant engineer. I’m looking to get out of this job for a number of reasons and may return to the UK. Who knows?
by Jonny | Apr 8, 2013 | Updates
WordPress has a content delivery network called “Photon” and what this content delivery does in WordPress’ own words:
Give your site a boost by loading images in posts from the WordPress.com content delivery network. We cache your images and serve them from our super-fast network, reducing the burden on your Web host with the click of a button.
I’m not sure what the issue is. However, on the site that is having the issue with Jetpack’s Photon module, well, it only has 600+ images and that’s including generated thumbnails. So, I’m really not sure what the problem is. Also, after scouring Google to find out if others are having issues, I found results suggesting that I was not alone.
From what I gathered the WordPress staff or people who’ve worked on WordPress plugins were saying the issues could range from a wide variety of issues. It could be that my site has another plugin which is conflicting with the Photon module, it could be that the design of my website is not compatible with Photon, or it could be that my images are too large. It could be anything essentially, which doesn’t really help. So for now, I’ve disabled it until I can find or come up with a solution.
by Jonny | Apr 5, 2013 | Travel
Image by James Barker.
If you are coming out of full-time education or taking a career break, you may be considering the idea of going travelling. It may be that you just want to take a holiday but fancy doing things a bit differently. The idea of backpacking is very appealing to some people, particularly if they want to explore several places on their trip. Heading to Greece gives you the chance to visit a huge number of different places but still keeps you relatively close to home.
Prepare
Long-stay backpacker insurance will need to be a top priority for those wishing to explore the world, as will a valid passport with plenty of time left on it. It’s worth arranging any visas you may need well in advance so that you are as prepared as possible for your trip. Invest in a good quality backpack to store all your things and take the time to pack wisely.
You can book flights but these are often expensive and will involve you making several of them if you want to visit other places on your trip. Trains are a very useful method for travelling across Europe, as there is a complex interlinked rail transport system through Europe – Eurostar being the main provider of inter connected train journeys throughout Europe.
Choose your stops
With Greece as your final stop, the places you can visit on the way include Brussels, Vienna, Budapest, Turin, Dijon, Milan and Venice. There are a number of different routes that will take you to Greece, depending on where you want to visit so if you want to see all of the above you may find yourself doubling back a few times.
You may decide to hire a car and drive across Europe on your way to Greece. Or alternatively, you can combine the two to have a unique experience. Some destinations will involve you catching a ferry so bear this in mind as well. You may decide to book some more ferry trips and visit some of the islands you pass along the way. Sicily, Rhodes and Crete can all easily be reached by boat and will give you a chance to visit some places you might not have even considered on a standard package holiday.
Money problems
You will need to ensure you have enough money to last through your trip so it can be helpful to plan ahead and book your journeys in advance. If you book far enough in advance, you can often get discounts as the prices have a tendency to rise as the date draws closer.
If you are travelling to countries that are not part of the EU, you will need to ensure you have the right currency as well. To ensure you have enough money to last you through each section of your trip, it may help to create an itinerary beforehand. This will allow you to decide where you want to go, how long you plan on staying and how much each section of the journey will cost you.
by Jonny | Apr 2, 2013 | Updates
I haven’t really bought anything nice lately and that’s due to me, well, not having much money… actually, more than anything I don’t want to cut into my savings until I can find a job when I go back to the UK.
I bought a nice pair of shoes as my old shoes weren’t in the best condition. My old pair had really worn down. First of all there’s a hole located on the front of my left side shoe. Secondly, on both of the inner-heels of my shoes the material has worn away, which means that every time I walk, the back part of my foot keeps rubbing against the plastic-type material where padding and material should be. – It causes minor discomfort and to get around this issue I simply lodged a sock in the round-hole type shape that has formed. It gets tiresome doing that everyday, so a new pair of shoes were in order and now I’m good.
However, I have realised that I can only do that for so long, and if I’m going to buy a pair of new shoes, I might as well buy it in Taiwan considering it’s more expensive in the UK to buy nice shoes. I think if I had bought shoes like this in the UK, it would have cost £85 or more. In Taiwan the pair of shoes I bought only cost me £35, which is a massive saving.
Here are the pics:
I also bought a new Logitech camera and I used that camera to take the pictures with; aside from the webcam itself, I used my phone. It’s pretty good and I’ve tested the quality of it over the internet and its pretty damn good. It sure beats the webcam that is integrated on my laptop, which is a 1 megapixel (Not sure on the video recording resolution, and I’m too lazy to look it up) camera in comparison to my new 720p camera that can take shots at 5 megapixels! 🙂 – I, for some reason, didn’t change the settings to take 5MP pictures, so the pictures I’ve uploaded aren’t of the highest quality.
by Jonny | Apr 1, 2013 | Updates
I’ve changed the design, yet again, as I wasn’t happy with the previous design.
The real reason I changed designs was due to the bad SEO that the other design had and it seemed that it was over-bloated more than anything without giving any real reward in terms of search engine optimization. It’s definitely a nice design and everything, but the SEO aspect fails in that regard. The new design on the other hand has many more options to feature articles that are hidden from the front-page, thus any hidden articles are also shown on the front-page and receive more attention thus will rank higher in search engine results.
Photography website update
I have also updated my photography website; although, that still need working on. I’m almost finished in completing it, but I’m quite sad with the result that I’m getting as the theme I am using wasn’t not built with photography in-mind. It’s hard to say, but the previous design that I was using is specifically for photography-type websites. Unfortunately, this web design is not. I’m pondering on whether to switch back or not. I think I’ll be able to tweak it and work with it to make things work! Either way, please visit this part of the site! – I’ve tried my best to make it look similar to my blog.
Jonathan Jones is an avid blogger, and a friendly guy! He also likes to type in third person because it makes it seem like there is more than one person running this site, thus concluding that he would in the future like to be a businessman.
