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With London 2012 underway, ForeignStudents.com Editor Andy describes his experience of one of the events live.

After applying for dozens of tickets for the London 2012 Olympics earlier this year, I got a grand total of two. They were for boxing at the ExCel Centre, and the big day finally came around yesterday.

With all the warnings of packed tubes and gridlocked streets, we were preparing for the worst. However, the trains all ran perfectly and we even got to pretend we were drivingone of them (as you should always do on the driverless DLR line- pictured below). Everything ran so smoothly that we even had time for a couple of pre-event pints after we arrived at ExCel an hour and a half early.

On a wet Saturday afternoon this weekend I caught the train out of London, away from the traffic and bustle of the city. My destination was the annual beer festival at a small country village called Penn Street. I grew up nearby, but I'd never been to the festival before, and so decided what better way to spend a weekend than drinking fine beers.

Beer is one of the great British drinks, and beer festivals are one of the great British traditions. There are hundreds of breweries up and down the country, each proud of their particular beer. At a festival, you can forget the watery, fizzy lagers of bars, and instead indulge in ales, bitters and porters.

In the first of a new series exploring the radical changes the British higher education system is undergoing, ForeignStudents.com Editor Andy looks at how new student visa restrictions are affecting international students.

Last year Theresa May announced that 260,000 fewer student visas will be given out over the next five years, through harsher restrictions on fake colleges and bogus students. Whilst it is clear that preventing fake students from illegally gaining visas is a positive thing, I believe the problem has been hugely overblown, and the solution poorly managed and badly miscommunicated.

Misuse of Figures

The basic problem here is that headline grabbing statistics have been used to the advantage of the government in order to impress British voters, whilst the very same figures have had the exact opposite impact on prospective international students. The headline figure of 260,000 fewer visas sounds like a high number and makes the government appear to be taking action. However, to prospective students abroad, the figure inevitably makes Britain appear less welcoming.

The ForeignStudents.com Editor, Andy, describes his very British tarditional day out at Cheltenham horse racing festival.  

"On Friday I ventured out to Cheltenham in the west of England to spend my very first day at a horse racing festival. What followed was a day of crowds, Guinness, betting (largely unsuccessfully), and most of all, good old-fashioned fun.

Horse racing is one of the great British traditions, with everyone getting dressed up in suits and hats to go and put a few pounds on their horse of choice. Cheltenham Festival is one of the biggest and most prestigious meetings in the horse racing calendar in Britain. Up to 70,000 fans turn up to each of the four days, and over the course of the festival, hundreds of millions of pounds are bet on the races. On Friday, I was one of those 70,000, contributing my own little bit to those hundreds of millions of pounds.

My Winners and Losers

I arrived at the grounds with a group of about twenty friends all dressed up in suits, hats and dresses, and we looked pretty stunning if I do say so myself. Whilst we had to make do with a coach to the Festival, there was a constant stream of helicopters dropping off the slightly wealthier festival-goers. Indeed, on the day, Princess Anne, Zara Phillips, Sir Alex Ferguson and Joe Hart (England goalkeeper) were among the celebrities there.

The Home of Football. It's a big name to live up to, especially with the England football team's woeful recent history. But, whilst the team may be struggling along without a permanent manager or captain, Wembley Stadium certainly does not disappoint.

With Euro 2012 now just three months away and the England team dominating the football news in the last month, there was a sense of confusion, but also anticipation in the run up to the game with Holland last night. It was with this backdrop that I caught the tube out to West London.