Daily Dose of English 126
Backpacks
Daily Dose of English 126
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben, and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day, I think. Yeah, it's every day, to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today, like every day. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about backpacks. which is a bit of a fun topic because kind of everybody uses a backpack at some point for something. They're so common, so ubiquitous, that's a good word, they're ubiquitous. I think I talked about this word a while ago, but ubiquitous means that something is everywhere. What is the root? Ubiquity? I don't know, but it means it's everywhere. And so backpacks are everywhere. Pretty much every school kid has them, every college kid has them. Oh, excuse me. Even if you work in any kind of job where you bring stuff to your work, you probably have a backpack of some kind, unless it's like a briefcase or something, but that's basically just an adult backpack. If you go camping, you probably have a backpack. If you go on vacation, you probably want to bring a backpack. They're just so handy. They're so helpful because you can put stuff in them and it's a lot lighter on your back. You can carry it around. They're just really nice to have. I've had many backpacks in my life, but I think there's only really two that I care about or want to talk about. No, that's not true. There's actually probably more. There's more than that, yeah. I think this would be a fun time to talk about it because it's the episode on backpacks. I've been doing this for 125 episodes and I still say stuff like that. Whatever. So the first backpack that comes to my mind that I remember is this backpack that I got a couple years ago, probably in like 2016 or 2017. I don't remember exactly when, but I got this backpack because I wanted to have a nicer backpack to do some traveling with and to be able to use easily. And I got one that unzips the entire front. so I can unzip the front and open it, sort of like a book, and you can see everything inside at once. And this is very nice, it's super handy. And what I would do is I would be able to pack stuff at the very bottom, but then open the bag all the way and take out the stuff at the bottom without having to move the stuff in the top. Like I didn't have to dig around in the bag to find something at the bottom. And I really like this. And this bag was pretty simple actually. It didn't have much else, it wasn't that expensive. It was, I don't remember actually, I have no idea, but it wasn't like over $100. That's where I'd say like an expensive backpack is above about $100, and a mid-range backpack is probably above 50, and then anything below that is just, well, actually, I guess you can get a cheap backpack for like 10 bucks. So maybe like the cheap backpacks start at 20, start at like, yeah, go up to 20 bucks and then whatever. Anyways, that does not matter. It wasn't that expensive, but it also wasn't a super cheap backpack. And it lasts me for quite a long time. Actually, I still have it. It's sort of falling apart and it's stained. And I got a new backpack sort of recently, and I gifted the bag to somebody else who was like, yeah, I'll use it. Because they don't mind that it's a little bit old and beat up. Because it's free, right? And I like to reuse that and stuff like that, so I'm happy to give somebody a bag, even though, like, yeah, it's a little gross, it's a little dirty, but you know what, it's fine. And that backpack was great. I traveled with it, I use it a lot, especially in conjunction, that's a great, another good word, I especially use it in conjunction with another backpack that I had, which was a very large travel bag. And in conjunction, by the way, is just a fancy way of saying with or alongside. And so this other bag that I had was actually a travel bag. which had backpack capabilities. So it was a pretty big travel bag that was waterproof and I could put stuff in and it had a bunch of little side pockets and things and pretty good for travel. I would say overall it's an 8 out of 10 bag. And I would use those two to travel all over the place. I traveled quite a lot in that time. And those bags were very helpful. The littler backpack, which was for just like day-to-day stuff, just if I wanted to leave where I was staying and go walk around, I could take that. And it could fit by my feet on the airplane. And the other bag was for all my clothes and stuff. And I used those two bags for quite a while. They were super functional, definitely liked them both. And I would recommend that sort of setup for anybody looking to travel. I even went on a pretty big trip for what's like five or six months with a huge group of people. I did this program called Up With People, which I might talk about in another episode, which is really cool. And I traveled around with essentially 80 other young people. I was the person that had the least luggage by far. When I showed up, the guy that was picking me up was like, okay, so let's go get your luggage. And I said, this is my luggage. And he goes, you don't have another bag? No, this is all my luggage. It's like, whoa, okay, we'll see how that goes. and everybody else had a humongous suitcase plus a bag and a backpack or a small bag. Everybody had three bags minimum and I had a medium-sized bag and a small bag and it was totally fine. Yes, I had less clothes than everybody else, but it didn't matter. Nobody noticed, nobody cared. I could wash my clothes and everything. It was totally fine. I don't know what I would do with a whole other bag. I just didn't have that much stuff to bring. And many people were quite impressed, actually. I was like, this is not hard, guys. This is easy. I remember one of the people that was working on the projects, I think she was doing marketing or something, I don't remember. But she was like, Hey, can we do a little video where we're like, go over what you brought to show it to future people to be like, look, you don't need that much shit. Bring less stuff. Look at Ben. Um, and so I did that and. It was, I thought it was kind of funny, but it's just, you don't need that much stuff. I don't know. Travel light, big, big recommendation. However, I want to go on to my new bags that I use now, which is the same setup, right? A smaller bag and a larger bag, but they're different. The larger bag is a different brand, and I think it's a lot nicer of a bag. I don't know, it just feels better. It's a little bit more thought out and better designed. Like the other bag had a bunch of these pockets that just had no space in them. So like if you filled up your bag, you just couldn't get into the pocket and there was a bunch of weird stuff with the bag. It was totally fine, but it's like, it's just, why would you need this pocket or why would you want that thing or whatever? But this new bag is a lot simpler, and it's more streamlined, and it's really nice. It's also really colorful, which I like. The first bag was totally black, and this new one is a ton of different colors. If you want to look it up, it's by a brand called Cotapoxy, I believe. C-O-T-A-P-A-X-I, I think. I don't know. And that's my large bag that I don't even use that often now. It's mostly like if I am going to go travel for a week or more. And my backpack, my real backpack that I now really like and love is a pretty large backpack for just carrying stuff. And I really like that it's well-designed for that. It is from lttstore.com, which is actually a brand of YouTuber merchandise sort of, but it's a little different. But I decided to get it after looking at a bunch of different backpacks around the same price range and the same stuff. And I found that it was the cheapest one that had all of the stuff that I was looking for, for being really resistant and really have good materials and having a lot of space and the pockets that I want and that sort of thing. And it took a long time to get here, but I don't regret it. I think it's a really nice bag. And it has been really useful, especially for going shopping, because I don't have a car, so I have to carry my shopping home. And so I put all the heavy stuff in my bag, and it's easy. If I go travel for a day or two, it has plenty of space in it. It's got tons of space. I can even bring a full towel if I need. When I went to the hot springs a couple weeks ago, or a week ago, or when was that? I think it was like a week ago, yeah. I brought a whole, like a full-size towel and it fit in there. It's also got plenty of little side pockets for my computer, my stuff, my journal, my Kindle, and so there's plenty of space in it and that's what I definitely appreciate it for that. It's just overall a good bag. It is expensive, but I decided that, like I was able to use my first bag for six years or something. And so I think I can get at least another five or six years out of this bag, which makes the price a lot more worth it because the small flimsy backpacks that you find that are for like 15 bucks just fall apart. And I don't appreciate having them because they don't have enough internal structure and they're not very, I don't know, they just don't feel good. And I think that's the core piece. Internal structure is something that I really, really appreciate. This backpack, when I put it on the ground, it stands up with nothing in it. It's got enough structure to not fall over and I can put stuff in it easily. It's easy to use. And that's a big thing. I hate backpacks that are just flimsy and just fall apart. They're just so annoying. I would prefer to use something different. That's all that I have for this episode. I hope that you enjoyed listening and I hope that you maybe learned a little bit of something about backpacks. Let me know down in the comments what kind of backpack you have and if you're looking to get a new one or whatever. But that's all that I got for today. Thank you all for listening and I'll see you again tomorrow. Bye.
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