Coffee Cups With Chloe // University

HEY

So guess what.... It's been another busy week. And that's why yet again you're getting a coffee cups with Chloe post. I guess this one is a bit different though because I'm drinking coffee on a train station rather than in my bedroom. Changing it up, getting crazy with the coffee themed posts. (I'm waiting for a train... I'm not just sitting on a platform especially so this post can be different!)

MY WEEK

So my week is been hella busy. And that is thanks to deadlines at university. It sounds crazy to say, but this is pretty much my last week as a first year uni student. I'm going back on the 28th for an exam and then that's it, I'll be packing up my little room and moving back home for the summer. I have no idea where this year went, it feels like only yesterday that I nervously started university! 

I study creative writing at uni, and luckily I love writing. Handy, since I do so much of it. This week has been spent in lectures and writing up portfolios of work to hand in this week and the start of next week. And if you don't believe me that I was busy then I'll tell you about my day yesterday to prove it: 

I started working at 11 (okay so I don't sound busy now but I gotta maintain that student lifestyle yo) on my poetry portfolio. This meant typing up the poems that were handwritten, editing others and reading through them all until it was perfect. Once that was done I moved onto my other portfolio which I can put any kind of writing in. For that I wrote about my travels in Australia and then a short poem about a family friend. This portfolio was pretty much done but I just needed to do the final touches. AND THEN, I had to pack a bag for coming home today. I stopped working at 6 o clock. During that time I only had an hour break to have lunch and watch an episode of Beverely Hills 90210 to relax my brain a bit. So that's 7 HOURS of work. Jesus. 

TV 

It's not all work though, I have had some free time, haha. I've been watching My Kitchen Rules a lot this week, as I missed it all last week because of my adventures around bath and Bristol. I love that programme. It's just relaxing to sit down and watch it after working all day and I don't know what I'm going to watch instead when this season ends! 

I've also just got into Desperate Housewives. I've watched a few episodes here and there and always enjoyed them, but I wanted to watch it properly because there was so much I didn't know that was making it less exciting to watch. Like what were the secrets they were all keeping? So I bought season 1 and I'm loving it. It's an excellent mix of humour, romance, drama and mystery. 

ALSO I SMELL GREAT

Yeah, you heard me. I smell great. When I was shopping last week I saw some Library of Fragrance perfumes in the clearance section of Boots. I'd heard  about these perfumes before because of the book scented one they do (still need to get my hands on that because I strive to smell like books). I sniffed all the different scents and decided to buy 3 - peach, marshmallow and moonbeam - as they were just £1.65 (!!!). They only had the testers for marshmallow and moonbeam but there was only a very little bit gone from them so I decided it was better than nothing. Then when I went to pay the lady gave me the testers got free! 

TL;DR - I got three amazing smelling perfumes for £1.65. Best bargain ever. 

I'm wearing the Moonbeam one right now and it smells like heaven. I keep getting whiffs of it and remembering how delicious I smell. 

FIN

I think that's probably enough for now, my book (White Cat by Holly Black) is calling me so I going to read that for the rest of my train journey (oh yeah, the train came while I was typing this, so this post has been brought to you via two different locations). 

Thanks for reading. Remember to follow me for new posts every week, and sometimes more :) 

Hope you're having a rad day! 

Love Chloe x

Coffee Cups With Chloe: Bath and Bristol

Begin...

HEY

I've had a crazy busy week and that means I haven't had time to write this weeks blog post. PLUS, I left my idea notebook at university so I don't have that to hand to look over all my ideas. And so what does that all add up to? A Coffee Cups with Chloe post (AKA, updates galore)!

BUSYNESS EXPLAINED
As I said, I was really busy this week. But luckily, it was the fun kind of busy, rather than the worky kind of busy. My sister came to spend a few days with me in Bath and we packed a lot into those three days. On the first day we went to Bristol to do some shopping and also to go to the aquarium. It was really wet and windy (shocking for England, I know) which meant we didn't actually do much shopping, but it's all good because the aquarium was awesome. They had jellyfish, stingrays and tiny frogs which were incredible colours. (And hella poisonous; the information about them said that just one tiny bit of their poison was enough to kill eight humans!)

On the second day I had lessons in the morning, but then we went shopping in Bath in the afternoon. It was still very wet and windy, so we had to dodge the rain by running from shop to shop and spending as little time as possible outside.

One of my purchases... the most beautiful brush ever. It's the tapered blush brush from the Bold Metals collection by Real Techniques <3

Jumping photos never really work out when you have long hair...

And on the third day, we went back to Bristol to go to Bristol Zoo, and it was actually sunny! I was really impressed with the zoo because they made the most of what they had. What I mean is that they didn't have many of the 'exciting' animals like giraffes, tigers, elephants, etcetera, but they made the animals they did have really interesting to look at. There were talks and feeds going on all day so you were guaranteed to catch at least one. We saw the otters and gorillas get fed, and it was so cool to watch this. Fun fact: gorillas are so like humans that they can have Calpol and paracetamol when they're ill! They also had a butterfly house which was rad, the butterflies are flying all around you and you can get some amazing close up photos of them.

The time spent not shopping or looking at animals and fish, we were in Walkabout, an Australian bar, eating Aussie food and drinking bundys. And when we weren't there we were in The Pig and Fiddle in Bath drinking bundys. Bundy is good, okay. (it's Bundaberg rum and coke, in case you didn't know.)

Sydney Burger and bundy in Walkabout, mmmmm.

And when we weren't shopping, looking at animals and fish, or being Australian, we were watching films at my home. We watched Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, which was really good. It was just easy-going and funny, and I think they ended the trilogy perfectly with that. The other film we watched was the modern version of Little Red Riding Hood with Amanda Seyfried in it. I'd never heard of this (I don't know how?) but I thought it was great. I liked the clever twist on the classic fairytale, and plus Gary Oldman was in it, so it was guaranteed to be good.

CALM
Life is going back to normal next week and I'll just be doing my usual uni thing, which means an few lessons, lots of reading and lots of TV watching, hahaha.

Make sure to follow me for weekly posts, with some extra posts thrown in here and there :)

Thanks for reading, I hope you're having a wonderful day and I'll talk to you soon.

Love Chloe x


HAVE SOME LINKS
Me on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGiddyElf
Bristol Aquarium: http://www.bristolaquarium.co.uk
Bristol Zoo: http://www.bristolzoo.org.uk
Makeup brush: http://www.boots.com/en/Bold-Metals-Collection-by-Real-Techniques-Tapered-Blush_1645015/

April in Photos

THE PHOTOS 

THE STORIES

This is my April in photos, and here are the stories of these photos: 

1. My sister did a Disney photo shoot and this was the Belle inspired makeup that I had. 

2. Easter treats #1.

3. Easter treats #2 - pavlova made by me and my my mum! 

4. Easter treats #3 - hot cross loaf made by me! 

5. Penguins at the zoo. 

6. Me at Marwell zoo :) 

7. I held a baby for the first time ever and he held my hair. It was kinda adorable (okay very adorable). 

8. Bundy and coke with my sister on National Sibling Day. 

9. This sunset view was on the roof of a carpark. Pretty rad, huh. 

10. We went to get churros and mocktails before going to the cinema and they had sombreros in the bar so we became SOMEBREBROS.

11. Waiting for food in wagamama and I was STARVING. I don't think I'd eaten food that wasn't pretzels since about 9am and at this point it was about 7pm. That's a long time to live on just pretzels. 

12. More mocktails, but with my mum this time. They were deliciooous!

13. We were looking through old photo albums and I found this photo of my sister and I at the 12 Apostles taken in 1997. How crazy is that? I would have been 1! (I'm the one on the left.)

14. Look at this adorable little cake! It tasted as yummy as it looked. 

15. My family and I went for afternoon tea at the Jane Austen centre in Bath and it was one of the best I've ever had. If you're in Bath definitely visit this place for "tea with Mr Darcy"! 

16. On that same weekend we stayed in the Tracy Park Hotel (just outside of Bath city) and we had a four poster bed! It was so cosy. 

17. Coffee in the sunshine just before my lecture. It was lovely. 

18. I went to the Harry Potter Studio tour in Watford with my mum and sister and saw the REAL HOGWARTS EXPRESS. So so so cool <3. 

THAT'S IT

So that's my April in photos. April was such a great month and I did lots of lovely things. 

How was your April? Let me know what you got up to in the comments :) 

Thanks for reading, make sure to follow me for posts at least once a week. 

Love Chloe x

A Weekend in France // TRAVEL

A Weekend In France - 14/15th June 2014

So over the past weekend my parents and I tumbled into our car at 5am and drove down to Kent where we would take the Eurotunnel, and it was here our adventure started!  

After an uncomfortable sleep in the back of the car and a short drive once we had arrived in Calais, we reached our home for the weekend - Le Touquet! Now you can go to markets all over the world, but France really knows how to do a market, although it's quite common to see spare parts for dolls and barbies in boxes, which is just a little bit terrifying. Saturday is market day in Le Touquet, so after having scones and lattes for breakfast (yes I did have scones have breakfast and yes it's as good as it sounds) we wandered over to the market. You could buy pretty much anything there - shoes, fruit, books, antiques, home ware, fish and that's just a little selection of the stuff on offer! My favourite purchase at the market was the radishes we bought; not because I really love radishes or anything, but because we bought them off a French farmer who had real life green fingers! And he looked really pleased that we'd chosen him to get our radishes from - bless! 

After lunch and a little browse around the few shops Le Touquet has to offer, we headed back to our hotel. Now the hotel we always stay at when we're there is right on the beach. Like when you step out of the door you're on the beach, pretty great right? However that does mean that rooms with a sea view are a little pricey! So we'd settled for a room with a view of the sand dunes (which is just a nicer way of them saying that your view will be of the car park and if you really stretch your head out the window you can catch a glimpse of the sand dunes). But to our surprise we had been upgraded to a room with a sea view, woooo! Also they'd left a bottle of Le Touquet brewed beer and biscuits in the room, extra woooo! 

We had our dinner in the best fish restaurant I've ever been to, the food there is amazing! And then we finished off the day in the hotel bar, where we were joined by the most beautiful sunset. It was all oranges and reds and pinks and the reflections of it on the sea were breathtaking. I could have taken thousands of photos, but due to the fear that it looked like I was taking photos of the couple sitting outside, I didn't... hahaha.

Now hotel breakfasts are one of my favourite things ever. There's just so much amazing food to choose from, and also an endless supply of coffee and orange juice which is great. And as I said, this hotel is right on the beach, so I enjoyed my platefuls of pastries and scrambled egg and bowls of cereal with a lovely morning view of the beach... Perfect!

Sunday’s in France are very relaxed, most shops close or are only open until midday, but when you’re right by the beach, shopping isn’t really on the top of my list of things to do. Therefore, we walked along the beach instead. The beach at Le Touquet stretches for miles, so even though I’ve been here loads of times, there were still parts of the beach unexplored. So we walked along those parts, discovering a lovely little café that was placed right on the sand and loads of little beach huts that were all brightly coloured and adorable. After some cold drinks we emptied the sand out of our shoes and headed into the main part of town. We took a quick look around some of the shops before they closed their doors for the day and then settled into the local Irish pub for a coffee. 

So cute.

People watching in the Irish pub.

Before leaving the beautiful beach and starting our journey home we got lunch in the hotel bar. A club sandwich and chips for me, accompanied with a pineapple flavoured mocktail, yummmm! And then it was just about time to go home.

The mocktails, delicious!

It was a short but sweet trip, and I can’t wait to have more Le Touquet adventures!