Who doesn’t like traveling, right? Seeing different cities, different countries, learning about different cultures is good for the soul. Even traveling to a city you haven’t been to in a while makes you feel good – I feel drunk with joy every time I visit Istanbul. But today is not about me. Today, it’s about Sam’s world journey, a minifigure who loves traveling and his story.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you ifolbricks (who joined our team in the beginning of 2024) and Sam!
IFOL Bricks
Hi, my name is Daniel and I’m a 24-year-old guy from Ireland. I started building LEGO when I was just five years old and have never stopped loving it since. I guess it’s the thing I’ve been enjoying the longest in my whole life. Wow.
I started posting about LEGO on social media in August 2022 on both Instagram and TikTok and it has been a lot of fun. It’s great that now, almost two decades since I first started building LEGO as a kid, that it is still bringing me so much happiness and opportunity as an adult. This year I also plan on trying to make some YouTube content . I can’t wait to see how that goes and continuing to grow my accounts and share my love of the brick with people all over the world.
Meeting Sam
I hadn’t heard or seen anything about Sam the minifigure until one day a post appeared on my Instagram from tomekskog showing a cute little minifigure in the city of Gdansk in Poland. The caption explained that Sam the minifigure “really enjoys travelling” and had already been to 10 different countries with 13 LEGO content creators on Instagram. It seemed so cool to me. All I had to do was comment “I’d like to show Sam the world.” and wait to see if I would be picked to have Sam delivered to me in Ireland from Poland. A few months passed and I didn’t hear anything, I had forgotten all about it until I received an e-Mail from Tomek asking if I still wanted to show Sam what it is like in Ireland. Of course, I said yes!
Sam arrived to me in Ireland on the 18th of November 2022 after a couple of weeks inside an envelope. Since arriving in Ireland, Sam and I have really travelled around together. First up was showing Sam the beautiful green mountains close to where I live. After that? We actually went to England for a trip together too, where I shot photos and videos of Sam at the Imperial War Museum in Duxford, England, before returning home. Finally, no trip to Ireland would be complete without going to the capital city of Dublin. I took Sam with me on a short trip there and took some photos and videos of Sam at some of the most famous sites in Dublin. Sam met a good friend and fellow Irish LEGO content creator in Dublin, too, @quirky_productions_2021. The three of us even took our photo together outside of the LEGO Store in Dublin; Ireland’s first LEGO Store and the place where I began my own content creator journey back in August 2022.
After our time together in Ireland I decided that the next country Sam should get to experience for #samsworldjourney should be Türkiye with @pinar.of.brickland. Türkiye is a country that is very special to me in my heart. I am so excited for Sam to experience the beautiful Turkish culture and history the way I got to experience it too. Türkiye is the perfect choice.
Sam, I will see you again my friend.
A special guest
With Daniel’s permission, I’d like to add a few more things.
There was a time when people who met through Instagram exchanged their sigfigs – is that still a thing? You sent your sigfig to a friend, and they sent theirs to you. My sigfig had a lot of custom parts when this was a trend, so I wasn’t able to participate much. However, I did make sigfigs of people I was talking with at the time and added them to my collection. Most of the minifigures below represent people who were active around 8-9 years ago. Although I don’t see most of them now, we had our little community back then.
Sam’s world journey adds a whole other dimension to the minifigure exchange. I was curious which countries he has been to, and found them all. Below is the list of people who have had him as a guest. You can click on their Instagram handles to visit their profiles.
- Bamberg, Germany, @tinyworld.s (where his journey started in December 2020)
- Mayorka, Spain, @zoombricks
- Finland, @thebrickdwarf
- Geisingen, Germany, @brickalicious_and_company
- Montpellier, France, @this.studs
- Valdobbiadene, Italy, @garloh_around_the_world
- Wells, England, @thebrickdude
- Alberta, Canada, @truenorthbrick
- Tennessee, U.S.A., @surgerysigfig
- North Holland, Holland, @brickexplorer
- Bonn, Germany, @alicebrickland
- Wrocław, Poland, @pablo_afol
- Gdańsk, Poland, @tomekskog
- Newry, İreland, @ifolbricks
- Duxford, United Kingdom, @ifolbricks
Türkiye was Sam’s 12th country. Since the original article was published, he has come here, we had our fun, and I sent him on his merry way to @legolina_n in Sweden. I hear now he has already departed for Hungary to visit @hekla_figs.
I’d like to thank Daniel again for the article and for letting me meet Sam. It was great spending time with a “toy” who travels more than anyone I know :)
See you in the next article!
Below are some of the photographs of AFOLs Sam visited during his journey. The rest are under #samsworldjourney on Instagram.
The first two images belong to ifolbricks, the third and fourth are mine. The images on the collage belong to their respective creators.
I played with LEGO a lot when I was a kid but I play with it even more as an adult.
