The Summer Student

To finish off

gildedbutterflies — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:49:10 +0000

Here’s a list of links where just being a student will entitle you to some delicious discounts to keep your bank balance happy.

Student Discount (.co.uk) Here’s a place that can get you discounts at McDonalds, Subway, The Boyshop and a variety of other places. All you need to do is register.

ensuring your time at University is about having fun and not worrying about money!

Damn straight.

Sta Travel- a delightful website dedicated to supplying us with cheap air fare prices, and further discounts for us students. Crossing the border has never been cheaper.

Probably.

SKINT- delightful. A pile of online discounts for clothing, booze, food…whatever.

Discounts at the online Apple store- because Mac’s might be sexy, but they’re expensive.

Student Free Stuff- another one of those “I don’t really have to explain it” sites. Free stuff. For students. Hurrah.

And the ever reliable NUS online. Student cards that you can flash at a shop assistant and they’ll knock some nuggets off your bill.

Now go forth and save money, because you know how

One of the cheapest and bestest summer recipes…

gildedbutterflies — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:36:01 +0000

…that I know of, and perfect as a BBQ side order or cooked up on a campfire at a festival, is detailed below. It’s also suitable for vegetarians and vegans. So no excuses, it’s a taste sensation.

Take a can of baked beans, and wash them until they’re free of tomato juice. Sweat an onion in a frying pan, add a bit of rosemary and some chives, and throw the beans in. Chuck in a tin of chopped tomatoes, and a sprinkling of tobasco sauce. (Keep tasting it so you don’t add too much or too little.)

Cook up some rice (boiled basmati is best for this,) and serve hot with salad. This little beaut is full of nutrients and costs very little to make.

I have also discovered the joys of cooking fish on a barbecue. You can get two fillets for around £3 which will fill you right up, and fish is full of protein and omega 3. Perfect for a healthy diet.

Take a fillet and cut it into 3 chunks. Place a piece on a square of tin foil, sprinkle with pepper, add a sprig of rosemary or a touch of parsley and top with a lemon slice. Wrap the foil around the fish segment like a little parcel, and chuck it on the BBQ for about 15 minutes, turning it occasionally to ensure even cookage. It will not disappoint.

Car Bootay

gildedbutterflies — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:45:02 +0000

Since I was little I’ve loved car boot sales. It’s a way not only to get rid of a lot of old crap and make a fair profit (I remember when I was 11 years old my Mum let me have my own car boot stall. I sold EVERYTHING, old toys, clothes, shoes, books…I made £150) But also a chance to look through other peoples stuff and find some incredible bargains.

Shopping combined with sunshine is a wonderful mixture. Often sellers will have bought goods from wholesalers and not been able to sell them all, so they bring them to a car boot. This is where you can really clean up. A pair of sunglasses for 20p? Don’t mind if I do.

Beware of scammers when you’re buying things such as DVD’s or CD’s from boot sales though. There’s always a chance you’ll be ripped off for some crappy copied version of Aladdin or something.

Also, take a look at this:

The story of a chap who bought what turned out to be a letter written by Abraham Lincoln at a car boot in Stratford-Upon-Avon for £1. Apparently it’s worth around half a million pounds.

Make your own junk.

gildedbutterflies — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:36:56 +0000

If your finding yourself increasingly short of money, and with no new fun things to wear, have a go fannying around with stuff you already own. Cut the sleeves off old tshirts and sew lace around the armholes for example. It’s a lot cheaper than going out and buying something new.

You can also make your own printed tshirts by recycling a plain old one, designing your own motif, printing it off onto transfer paper then ironing it on to your shirt. Bish bash bosh.

One thing I’ve started to experiment with recently is making accessories. There are heaps of places on the internet that sell beads, buttons and trinkets at really low prices. All you have to do is stick them together in an original kind of way and you’re sorted. You could even make some money on the side by selling them at boot sales or from an ebay store. Genius all around.

Some of my most highly recommended crafty stuff retailers:

Tongue tied- apparently lacking in stock at the moment but the basics are there.

The Bead Shop- does exactly what it says on the tin.

E-Beads- SO much stuff.

And it’s always worth going to a textile shop to have a look at the material remnants on offer to see if they’d be useful in creating anything fun.

The Park.

gildedbutterflies — Wed, 07 May 2008 13:18:04 +0000

It’s free, it’s fun and it has a zip line.

With the weather hotting up, we all want to be out in the summer sunshine, frolicking like idiots. An outing to the park is a perfect excuse to laze around soaking up UV rays, and of course, it’s FREE.

We discovered the park on a drunken night out last week. We call our new tradition “drunken Thursday”; it’s basically an opportunity to blow off some steam without having anything to do during the day. On this particular day, we chummed up with another house who had been to the park by the castle before. None of our housemates had; and so tanked up with gin, we ambled down there in the darkness and commenced blundering around.

I was horribly injured in the whole “see how many people we can get on the zip line” scenario; we managed to get four of us on, and I was dragging along the floor the whole way. So halfway through the zip (going about 60, 70 thousand miles per hour,) I thought, shit it. I’ll let go.

Mud and grazes all up my back, multiple kicks to the face, and a nasty bang to the head with a side order of whiplash. It was amazing.

We’ve ventured back there since under less dangerous pretences just to lie around and talk about the meaning of life, soaking up a bit of summer sun and trying to avoid being trampled by hyperactive toddlers.

Ideal.

Yet MORE Tips and Tricks

gildedbutterflies — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:52:02 +0000

Instead of always going for ridiculously expensive beauty products or treatments, experiment with making your own from household items. Do not fret. I am not insane. Try cracking an egg into a bowl, slathering the white on your face, waiting for it to set on your skin, then washing it off. I kid you not, the proteins will soak into your skin making it silky smooth. It was a trick I learned from my Mum when I was really small; I used to get eczema on my hands and no joke, a few eggy treatments cleared it up in no time. Avocados, bananas and olive oil are all also rather fantabulous for the skin, and rubbing coffee grains into problem areas can help reduce stubborn cellulite. I read that somewhere, it could be a lie… let me know if it works for you.
DO NOT throw something out because it’s broken, or because you don’t like it anymore. Clothes, shoes, accessories, stuffed toys, whatever the hell it is; set up a jumble sale and get rid of your crap that way. Or sell your stuff to a second hand shop. Put it on e-bay. I don’t care WHAT the arse you do with it, but by sending all that shit to a landfill you are slowly murdering our planet and also cheating yourself out of what could be a good few bob.
Instead of buying books and DVD’s, get yourself to a library or rental store. In the long run this will save you a lot of money. You can broaden your horizons for next to nothing, and broaden the horizons of others in turn. I had this one friend who used to return library books with little notes hidden within the pages for the next borrower to read. Cute.
Never underestimate the amount of stuff you can get on the cheap if you look in the right places. One of my friends got his bike from a dump. Initiative is priceless.
If you find a penny, pick it up. Put it in a jar, save it for a rainy day. Sounds like the opening to a cheesy song, but works like a charm. Soon you could have a jar FULL of pennies
Try not to invest in a contract phone. You go so much as 3 seconds over your call limit and you’re a quarter into your overdraft. That’s where they get you. Stay with a pay as you go deal and give yourself a certain amount to stick to per week. Organising your finances in the smallest ways will make a difference.

My my my, it’s nearly 3am. I should probably get some sleep.

HAHA!

gildedbutterflies — Sat, 03 May 2008 01:29:12 +0000

On a completely unrelated note, this blog has been picked up and quoted by two fellow bloggers. It’s nice when that happens- trynewshit has quoted some of my second hand music related blitherings, and some facebook blog has nicked an excerpt:

The Summer Student wrote an interesting post today…

And then went on to link it. The web is more informative than I give it credit for. I was under the impression that my demographic was limited to people on my course and people I live with.

Apparently, nein.

Try New Shit(.com) defines itself as a digest:

Here at the Digest we don’t write the blogs, we just provide a short snippet of the best content from around the web.

HAHAHAHAHA, I’m a short snippet of web content! Happy days. Well, anything that expands my audience is fine by me.

Spread the summer student gospel, keep me in business.

Adios amigos

Music on the cheap

gildedbutterflies — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:34:55 +0000

Love records, hate how much you have to pay these days?

CD’s and vinyls can be found at stupidly low prices in second hand music stores- again, of which there are many in London. The Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill Gate (yes, Notting Hill again!) stocks second hand records, cassettes, CDs and even mini-disks. And because they’re second hand, they’re cheap as…cheap stuff. String. Or penny sweets.

They run a part exchange service and their stock is always changing, so you can go there frequently and always find something new and wonderful.

There is nothing better than cheap music. Something with a little more substance than an itunes download.

Free tickets for fun tingz!

gildedbutterflies — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:22:50 +0000

The BBC film stuff. Some of that stuff needs an audience. For the bargain price of NOTHING (except a return train ticket I guess,) you, yes YOU can be in that audience.
‘Citing.
And this website RIGHT HERE is the reason that me and my fellow house-livers are going to see QI on Monday. I love Steven Fry, he’s so wickedgood.

And it isn’t just tickets for Quite Interesting, no no no no no. You can also see:

Just to name a few.
Just to let you know that good entertainment need not be costly.
Huzzah!

For this week:

gildedbutterflies — Fri, 02 May 2008 17:03:54 +0000

I am risking filling my inbox with spam in an attempt to test websites dedicated to students.

More explicitly, getting free stuff, discounts and opportunities for students.

Today I have joined studentbeans, a website boasting

exclusive student offers, deals and discounts for free.

Fine….fair enough….

The sections are broken up into sub-catagories like “eating out,” “Gifts and electronics“, “bars, clubs and pubs“, yada yada blah….

I have so far entered competitions for a free macbok pro- ‘cos you know, winning one eliminates any chance of having to pay for one- and had to go through 4 or 5 pages of subscriptions, ticking yes or no as to whether I would like to hear from around 40 other companies about their upcoming offers; a lengthy, boring process which took around 15 minutes as there are about 70 separate companies all wanting you to subscribe.

Offers relating to food include free Millie’s cookies and 25% off Dominoes pizza, as well as a free beer at Nando’s when you spend £6 or over, 15% discount at the Slug and Lettuce, 20% off your bill at Bella Italia and 25% off your total bill at Yo!Sushi (a wonderful asian eatery that serves the most wonderful chocolate brownies).

All in all, quite a few good offers. And I am not one to turn down free crap.

There are also loads of offers relating to entertainment thingies:

2 for 1 cinema tickets at Odeon, 2 for 1 tickets at Cadbury World, Free DVD rentals from Lovefilm.com, and the opportunity to save 50% on West End shows amongst other things. It’s getting better…

There is also a section dubbed “market”:

We’ve scoured the web to find you a unique selection of online retailers that will help complement student life. We have reviewed loads of sites to make sure you’ll get the best deals, discounts and offers.

Which, sounds kind of like the aim of this blog, only in a more specialised kind of way. There’s a link to the “fun stuff” section (more competitions,) a “tv” section (articles for students, by students, including this rather weird video about Krispy Kreme doughnut promotions,)

and a link to facebook…which I guess everyone uses these days.

So the general consensus is that this site is quite good. Aside from the multitude of irritating advertisements and the multiple (compulsory) opportunities for subscribing to sites you have never heard of before and would rather never hear from again; Student beans offers quite a myriad of discounts and offers, all for us

YAY for Student Beans!

I hope I win that Macbook…