My TIme in England

I spent three weeks of my summer vacation in England. Or rather, a small town on the south west coast called Torquay. I was there together with 30 other teenagers, without any parents. We lived in local families, went to school a few hour a day and did a lot of different activities and trips. We were at something called a language course. Even though it was very, very exhausting due to a packed schedule, I had a ton of fun and have many amazing memories.

A picture of Torquay harbor

The meaning of these trips is to learn more English. The books we used in class were pretty easy, so I didn't learn much from there. But since you're exposed to the language all the time and have to speak it to get understood, it now feels more natural for me to speak English. I've always felt great with writing, reading and listening, and now I can finally add speaking to that list.

We spent the last two days of our trip in London. It's been my favorite city since I visited London for the first time, five years ago. It was awesome to come there again. We saw the truly amazing musical Wicked, the story of the evil witch in The Wizard of Oz. I highly recommend everyone who can to see it!

There's a lot of countries that you can visit for your language course and they arrange them for teenagers from all over the world. If you're interested in more information, you can visit STS-education.com or EF.com (And no, I'm not writing this post just to tell you about how amazing these companies are, I just want other people to be able to experience the same things that I did.)

Five Best Things With School Starting Again

Hello you guys! I've really missed you all. I know that I've been lacking in blogging these last couple of weeks, I'm sorry about that. I've been really busy during summer break and still haven't really get used to school after the vacation. So what if we just forget it all and start out with a clean slate?

Now, even though school is a big, time sucking hole with tons of exams, boring lessons and my personal hell, gym class. There's still some pretty fun things about it. You just have to see everything from the positive side when you're sitting at your desk at 2am covered in homework and knowing that you're going to fail on your english test.

Being on Schedule Again
During vacations you have all the time in the world, which is great. But I'm a person who works best under pressure, so I never get anything done when I'm on a break (hence why I haven't blogged the last days on summer break when I didn't have anything to do). Now when I don't have much time to spend, I make every second count. No more pointless TV watching or Internet surfing!

Learning Interesting Things
The whole point of school is to learn! And you do get to learn fun stuff in school. I seriously want to be fluent in French, know everything about World War 2 and know how to convert meter per second into kilometer per hour. And it would be an awful lot of work, that I probably wouldn't do, if I wanted to learn all these things by myself.

Meeting All the Friends Again
You know those classmates who you talk a lot to in school but never spend time with outside of school? It's fun meeting them again.

Those Awesome Teachers
Even though many of the teachers are annoying and not good at their job, there is some really good ones that make you stare at the clock waiting for their lesson to start. Those who are funny, kind and really good at teaching.

Weekends!

Let's face it, if you were on vacation the whole time, weekends would be nothing special. 

Beautiful Darkness Book Trailer

I love book trailers, but think that they don't get enough attention in the book blogging community. That's why I started Trailer of the Week. Every week I'll feature one amazing book trailer that really grabs my attention.

I loved Beautiful Creatures and would've read Beautiful Darkness a long time ago if it wasn't for my overflowing to be read pile. Yeah, it's a hard life being a book lover these days. I really hope to have time to read this book soon, since I'm really interested in knowing what happens in Lena's and Ethan's story. And this book trailer is just beautiful!

Tower of Parlen Min - Reivew

Tower of Parlen Min (The Narrow Escapes of Ves Asirin #1)
by Matt Xell
Published: July 23rd 2010
Rating: 4/5

Goodreads | Author Blog | Amazon

Ves Asirin wins a trip to the Tower of Parlen Min. There, with 19 other children, he competes in the Sword Challenge; a series of puzzles and tasks, for $12 million. As fantastic and glorious as the tower seems to be, Ves finds that it keeps a dark and secret history that he has been connected to for over 150 years, a secret that will define his destiny ... if he can escape 'The shadow'.

Tower of Parlen Min opens up with a strong and mysterious prologue. A boy is sitting on a bus in the middle of the night. He's covered in blood, wearing other people's clothes and can't remember anything. Instatntly thousands of questions pop into my mind. These are the kinds of prologues I love. Exciting, mysterious and making you want to know everything about the characters and their story.

In the first chapter we get to know the boy when he has yet to experience the bus scene. His name is Ves Asirin, he's 11 years old, lives in an orphanage and has a very complex memory loss disorder. He gets to visit the famous inventor Jacobius Trent and participate in a competition called the Sword Challenge.

I really enjoyed this book. It has everything I love, fantasy creatures, puzzles, plot twists, actionfilled scenes and a lot of questions that you're dying to know the answers to.

I loved the idea of Ves' scrapbook that he filled with scetches and pictures of things and people to remember them. You were introduced to a lot of different people at the same time, but it was easy to keep track of just the most important ones. I adored Ves' friend Tammi, who nobody really liked because they thought that she's a witch. And the twins Andy and Anry we're so much fun.

The ending was epic with lots of plot twists and chocking answers on lots of questions. And it ends with a wonderful cliffhanger that leaves you craving the next book.

Croatia in pictures

As you might know, I spent two weeks in Croatia a while ago. I tried to put my experiences and what I thought about the country into words, but didn't succeed. So I decided to let you guys see some of the few pictures that I took there. 

Even though Croatia is a beautiful country, I unfortunately didn't photograph that much. Which is very unusual being me. But I'll work with what I've got.

We stayed in a small town called Vodice. It's at the southwest coast of Croatia, and we only had a few hundred meters to walk from out house to the beach. Which would be awesome if I actually enjoyed swimming, but still. This is a picture of what we saw from our house. I know that the picture isn't that good, but bare with me.

One of the first places we visited, except for the town we lived in, was an island called Trogir. This is not the island, but the city you had to leave your car in to then walk over a bridge to come to the island. I managed to get a part of Trogir into the picture, look at the upper right corner. This is the best you get when you try to take pictures from the back of a car ..

This is what you saw everywhere. Clear water, palms and beautiful houses.

More palms!

The city you had to visit in order to get to Trogir. To the left you can see a part of one of the bridges that connected the island to the city.

A part of Vodice.

One day we made a four hour trip to get to the city Dubrovnik. This is the gate that leads into the old Dubrovnik, which is pretty small and has a tall wall surrounding it. The newer parts of Dubrovnik is built around this "old city".

 Here you see the wall that surrounds the "old city" and some of the new houses in the background.

Since Croatia was in war about ten years ago, you could see bullet holes and destroyed houses everywhere. It was really sad to drive through abandoned towns with completely ruined houses everywhere. 

This amazing waterfall is somewhere near Vodice. It's very long and you can't see the whole thing at once. Instead you have to climb up a high mountain to be able to see more parts of it. The waterfall was amazing, but climbing up a mountain in 40 celcius degrees heat when you have a fever, is nothing I can recommend.

This is a book blog, so let's wrap this up with some Cratian editions of english books.

Ultraviolet - Review

Ultraviolet

by R.J. Anderson

Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group

Publication date: September 1st, 2011 

Rating: 4/5

Once upon a time there was a girl who was special.

This is not her story.

Unless you count the part where I killed her.

Sixteen-year-old Alison has been sectioned in a mental institute for teens, having murdered the most perfect and popular girl at school. But the case is a mystery: no body has been found, and Alison's condition is proving difficult to diagnose. Alison herself can't explain what happened: one minute she was fighting with Tori -- the next she disintegrated. Into nothing. But that's impossible. Right?

Ultraviolet started as a very interesting and special book about a girl who's on a mental care against her will. She can't remember how long she's been there. Or how she ended up there. But there's one thing she remembers, having to do something with another girl's death. In the first half of the book you get to follow her as she tries to make life work at a mental care and wants to know what's really happening with her. But after a while the book takes a huge turn that totally blew my mind.

One of the first things that really drew me into the story was the writing. It was beautiful. R.J. Anderson is very good at writing detailed descriptions. I really felt like I was inside of Allison's head and saw the world through her eyes, even though she experiences the world differently than most people.

I can't really tell more about the book without spoiling anything. I can't even write which genre it is. So I'll just tell you guys to read it. It's a amazing book that shouldn't go unread.