During my intermittent year of university which is like a gap year but starting the gap year after starting a semester in university and then taking the rest of the year off, during my second year of university.
I took the intermittent year to improve social skills and develop hobbies like photography, during this time I socialised more, as well learn things that my help me more later. But also bought a camera. I also developed a bit of writing skills (which helped writing a novel that was self-published on Amazon, but I'm soon uploading it onto GitHub for free.)
I also decided I would try and travel on my own, and stay in a hostel during my travels for that to be more affordable and develop important skills.
Photography I thought would take me a while to get decently good at but I bought a course before I got my Canon 650D, an entry level camera but good enough for a hobby (I even did a bit of freelance photography later with a Nikon Z6, but I didn't want to do that for a career, although I was good at it.)
I practiced a bit with the camera and then decided to travel to Kew Gardens in London, and I was surprised that my photography was quite good, my composition was great and I used the camera well in different situations and even found a small waterfall to take a picture of water with slow shutter speed.
Editing the photos took a while, but eventually I edited my best shots. But I was pretty fast at that too. That being said I'm not an expert in photography or photography editing, but it's still a fun hobby I have.
I'm still really working on better Instagram photos, with my phone, and in the past some of my photography with cameras has been on Instagram, but I'm trying to develop a style that different with my phone than photography with a camera. Although, I'll probably still upload pictures with my phone mostly on Instagram and sometimes with my camera, which might be different.
I learnt some skills in building websites as well, which is useful for me now.
I could only really afford to go to Prague once I got student loans for my next year of university. But I also travelled to Oxford although with the Travel society in my university, which was the University of Essex. I travelled to Budapest (on my own), Australia (Perth, Melbourne and Sydney) through a year abroad in my third year of university, and I was the only student from my university who went there. After I graduated I also went to Budapest (on my own again) a second time while I was working in a laboratory (not a joke, I studied Biomedical Science in university.)
I'll be writing a blog about my fun travels in later blogs. But I haven't scheduled that yet, I'm trying to organise my blog posts a more fun and interesting way about different topics, but also expanding on some at different times. The aim is for more interesting blogs that are overall more fun to read, and not all in chronological order.