I’m sitting here in the kitchen on the night before I leave. My flight leaves at 9.00 this morning, and I’m taking a Taxi at 6:00 from Stockholm to Arlanda, which means I’ll approximately have about 2 hours to kill at the airport before boarding the plane. Just like these hours now, in the middle of the night.

I’m staying up now, in hopes of getting less jet lagged when I get to Singapore. I’ve written a song and uploaded it to youtube, in order to entertain myself. Now it’s time to fix the blog, so that it is representable before I start my exchange. This is probably what I will do the rest of the night (yay!)…

So first of all, let me introduce my thoughts on this blog. Firstly, I write in English, because I know that a big portion of my audience will probably not be Swedish. Secondly, this will be my travelling blog while on exchange at NTU in Singapore, and my goal is to make it a handy tool for others to discover Singapore and Asia with. As such, I will try to write more about places, events and interesting people, rather than feelings and boring, unnecessary stuff. As I’ll be studying, I’ll probably give an update on what I’m learning every now and then, and maybe I’ll write about something cool I’ve read about (if you like to read about state-of-the-art science and technology, visit futurism.com; awesome site for the tech-interested).

Anyways, let’s not get ahead of ourselves; there’s actually alot left to do on this blog, before I consider it to be good. I have a few different ideas on what I want to add/fix:

• Bucket list page; i.e. things I want to do/places I want to visit on my exchange. This page should also contain a map of the places I want to visit, as well as the places I want to visit. Maybe Google has a nice API for their maps that I can integrate to this blog? We’ll see!
• A nicer front page. First of all, I want to add a better logo for “Andreas Travels” when I get time. Secondly, I want to add a section before the blog. What this should contain, I am a bit uncertain of thus far, but I’m thinking of a image to represent this blog. Below this image, I’ll perhaps add some buttons for navigation of the page. It would also be nice to have a calendar somewhere, in order to click your way to specific posts. Not sure of what to about this yet, though. Hmm… Maybe icons for each country I’ve visited, and when you click these, you get to the posts that belong to the country? We’ll see!
• Photo gallery. I want a page where I can display all my uploaded photos, distinguished from the blog posts. As my photos will come from google photos, I will look into ways to integrate images from that API to my blog more quickly. The sweet spot would be if I could find a way to link the images to my blog from the mobile app. That way, I could take a picture and almost immediately have it up on my blog. Not sure whether or not this could work, though… and perhaps I would have to construct a mobile app in order to get that work. Which is one of the last things I would want to do…
• Prev and Next buttons to my posts. I don’t know whether this feature is already active in the template I’m using now. If not, this needs to be fixed.
• A box to the right of the text in a post, where you can see photos, music, map locations, etc. that belong to the post. This is not a priority now, however, as many of the other points are more crucial.
• Boxes for +/- (positive and negative) about the experience I had in the post. For example, if I visit a city, I can list the positive and negative aspects of that visit. That way, it is easy to get a quick view of the overall experience in the post, as well as a list of tips for your eventual journey to the same place.
• Images next to the posts in the front page. If photos were taken and belongs to the post, why not show a miniature of one of the photos on the front page?

This is what I can think of right now. I’ll most definitely think of more things in the future, but let’s leave it at this short list for now! Here’s my song that I wrote about earlier (I’m not giving you the vid, cause I can’t sing for shit):

Bye bye, Sweden
Bye bye, sweet home
I’m gonna have a new adventure
I’m gonna go out of here
I’m gonna get to know a new world,
A new place to call my home

Asia’s waiting there, she’s try’na
Pull me a thousand miles away
We’re gonna see a lot of
Sunshine,
moonlight,
warm nights,
City lights

We can never be certain of
This flight that we’re all set above
Sometimes it’s up, and sometimes it’s down
But as long as we keep steering forward
We’ll always see a good time

Who could have imagined?
Five years ago, that I’d knock on your door
Say hello to me Singapore

Asia’s waiting there, she’s try’na
Pull me a thousand miles away
We’re gonna see a lot of
Sunshine,
moonlight,
warm nights,
City lights,

Oh, and welcome to my travelling blog!