It's been a while...

Hafn't posted for a long long while... Couldn't post when I was away on vacation.

My sister went home yesterday. My room feels a little empty now that I'm alone again... Gotta get used to this until I go home myself in Nov. It had been really nice having her around. So much happened (both good and bad, fun and sad - hey that rhymes! haha...) in the a-little-over-3-weeks she's been here that I don't even know where to start to write. A couple of times we got on each other's nerves, but it was all ok at the end of the day. :)

We were in London from 4th to 7th July. It was a good trip, except that the pound is so strong everything's 3x as expensive! *Ouch*

We took an overnight bus to London (Were almost late for the bus. Had to get there at least 30min before departure but we arrived at the station exactly at 10pm, the departure time. Thankfully, there were many people still queuing up to 'check-in'.) Takes about 8 hours to get there from Paris. Because Britain is not part of the Schengen agreement in the EU, there was a passport check in the middle of the night before we go onto the ferry to cross the Channel. It was quite neat cos' the bus went onto a HUGE ferry to cross the Channel. The night was unexpectedly cold (I had expected the weather to be warm and nice since it's summer, and had heard from my cousin before that it's really warm in London). I had only a thin cardigal with me which I gave to my sister (She didn't bring her jacket as it was dirty and I thought she wouldn't need it since it SHOULD be warm!) I had another jacket (just in case of bad weather... Thank God I brought it) but it was in my bigger bag in the lugguage compartment of the bus and iI couldn't get to it until after we got off the ferry. It was raining and so very cold! I think it must have been less than 10 degrees and I was just wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt. Burrr...
Arrived in Victoria Coach Station in Central London at about 6am and proceeded to find our hostel. Left our baggage in the lugguage room and armed with my Western Europe guide book, we went off to Buckingham Palace at 9plus to watch the change of guards. It was quite a grand 'ceremony' with marching guards on horses, a marching band and various processions of guards. The ceremony ended with fighter jets (I think that's what they were) flying past Palace leaving trails of red, white and blue smoke. A pity I wasn't fast enough with my camera to catch the planes on 'film' (digital).

After, we went to St James' park nearby for a stroll. It was a big big (sighz, my vocabulary is so limited, I have to use 'big' twice in place of 'huge' and 'large' which are the only other words I use to describe big...) park with lotsa fowls - ducks, swans and my sister went crazy photographing them *_* (Thus received dire warnings from me not to waste too much memory taking pictures of birds... O_0).

And then... the rest of the trip kinda mashed into a blur. I remember pieces of things here and there but not exactly when what took place. I think on the 2nd day, we visited the National Gallery, which had lotsa masterpieces (for example, one of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, amongst many others which I can't remember offhand now...). But we only had a few hours to look through all the highlights and even then by the end of it, we were feeling a little numbed by the number of paintings we've seen.

The weather in London was really unexpected, cold, grey and not to mention, rainy... On one rainy day (like I mentioned before, can't remember which one exactly, but it might be the 2nd day after visiting the National Gallery), my sister and I ended up spending a whole evening in Lillywhites (a sports apparel store), cos' she SO had to buy soccer stuff for her guy frens. And cos' the pound is like 3x of S$, I had to constantly remind her about how much she actually is spending on each gift... It's horrendous, the number of frens she wanted to get presents for! Female Santa Claus...

Took walks in quite a number of parks and saw some veterans walking in the parks in their uniforms with many, many badges. That week happened to be War Memorial week or War Veteran week or something like that.

We walked along the Thames River the 2nd night and saw the London Eye, Big Ben and the Westminister Abby. It was a breathtaking scene and I had to hit myself on the head for forgetting to bring my tripod (can't take night pictures w/o my tripod)! Arghh!!! The Big Ben and Westminister Abbey looked kinda eerie by night cos' there were green lights illuminating them. (Can't imagine why they would use GREEN lights?!!? Unless they wanted to paint a scene like that from a horror film, at which I think they succeeded really well in doing...) By day, the Big Ben just looks exquisite... ^_^

We didn't eat very much when we travelled. Most times we just eat biscuits that I brought from Paris or buy some stuff (chips, and 2 big packs of cereal cos' it was buy 1 get 1 free -- hee, the Singaporean in me proves her existence! 1 of which is still in my house now) from the supermarket. I really wonder how we survived on that kinda diet, and with all that walking.

The 2nd night, I bought 2 egg mayo sandwiches and what I thought was a bottle of orange juice and we found a place outside an arcade where we sat on the floor to eat our dinner. Still remember it was freaking cold outside... I opened the bottle of 'orange juice' and, being the nice big sister, (erhm) asked my sis to drink first (I suspected there was poison in there... hee...). She took a drink and asked me if it was a concentrate... I took a swig and then one look at the bottle which said 'Orange Squash' and we both started laughing. At the side of the bottle, not very obviously stated, were instructions on how many parts of the squash to add to how many parts of water... I was so thirsty and tired when I was at the supermarket that I didn't recognise the word 'Squash', let alone see the label. I just grabbed it cos' it was orange in colour and it wasn't too expensive. I had wanted to get a 2L bottle of water but my sister protested cos' she said it would be heavy to carry around and we still had a bit of walking to do... We could hardly stop laughing at our stupid blunder... I don't fancy squash very much (especially when they use artificial sugar) but cos' I was really thirsty, my sister went to the toilet and added '4 parts water to 1 part squash' in my water bottle. We finished the diluted squash in my bottle and when we got back to the hostel, left the concentrated bottle in the 'free food' section.

Visited the scarily expensive shopping mall, Harrod's where in the food department (probably the only department in which we could afford to buy something), Krispy Creme gave out free samples of their original frosted doughnuts, hot from the oven!!! Yummeh!!! We both had one each. I had previously tried Krispy Creme when I was in the US, and it was good...
but this was better as the sample doughnuts were coming out from the oven in a conveyor belt-like style! After that one sample, we decided we should try the other flavours and so we got a dozen, all different flavours! *drools* After we bought them, we kinda wandered if it was too much... 12!?!? hmm... so we had doughnuts for lunch/dinner that day and also the next morning... The doughnuts were good but we both decided we've had our fill of doughnuts for a while. :)

I had planned to catch a musical but my sister wasn't too interested and we ended up not having enough time to do that too. Though on the last day, as we were walking along the Thames River, we passed by the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and were lucky that there was a play about to start. It was a really entertaining play, The Tempest. Each of the 3 actors played several roles and sometimes it's difficult to tell when they were who cos' I don't know the play very well. Plus, in the beginning I was kinda lost... But all in all, I enjoyed it very much. (It helped that one of the actors was pretty cute. heh.) Though I kinda had a backache after cos' we bought standing tickets (was going to write standing seats when I realised that's really oxymoronic...).

Hmmm... now what else did we do? Ah yes, we had a proper dinner (actually just pub grub, but still, proper food compared to what we had been eating) on our last night in London. We both had Fish & Chips, and shared a jacket potato with chillies. It was pretty good.

Ah, things are starting to come back to me now... Late one night while we were walking back to Central London, we were approached by a strange guy who smelled really strongly of alcohol and spoke in an English ( I can't place from which part of Britain exactly) accent which was hardly understandable, asking us for some change to make a phone call. I told him sorry I don't have any change but he wouldn't go away. Luckily there were a couple of police personnel around (Wouldn't be politically correct to say policemen since one was a lady) who asked us if everything was ok. Then they proceeded to speak with the man and signalled for us to go. Phew...

Can't forget to mention that my sister lost my favourite pair of sunglasses in Hyde Park... It wasn't really her fault as it suddenly started pouring and the wind was blowing really hard while we were there. I was quite upset at first but I thought I really couldn't let this ruin our whole vacation and determined to cheer myself up. Anyway she was quite sorry about it. But after a while, when she saw that I wasn't going to pull a long face the whole day, she was ok.

We shared a 3-scoop ice-cream cone from Thornton's (a chocolatier much like Godiva), which my cousin said we had to try, especially the chocolate heaven/heavenly chocolate (I can't remember which) flavour. It was pretty expensive, but it was good! Though after I went to Italy, I decided no ice-cream is better than Gelati! :)

After 7 months in Paris, I almost forgot how easy it is to exist in a country in which almost everyone speaks and understands English. In London, if we were lost, I could very easily ask for directions w/o having to use try to translate English into French in my head. Londoners are quite nice when I do ask for help in finding directions.

One significant event during my stay in London would be the election of the city that would host Olympics 2012. Paris was the hot favourite. And MY FAVOURITE! I've come to love Paris like She's a 2nd home to me... And She deserved to win. If you were in Paris, you could see the excitment and efforts put into this. There were Paris 2012 on all big landmarks (everywhere you go, you could see that), there was a huge Olympic-like sports event held on Champs Elysees where the whole road was cleared and tracks, temporary pools and stuff installed and one could tell the French were really looking forward to winning it from the way they talked about it. Unlike when I was in London, it was the week of the election and I hardly saw anything that reminded me that London was in the run too or heard anybody talk about it 'cept for a countdown meter that was in front of the National Gallery which no one seemed to care about anyway. My sis however, supported London cos' she felt more comfortable (said it's the language) in London than she had in Paris.

6 July was the big day. At about 1pm, I saw some planes fly past the Thames River leaving the red, white and blue smoke behind them. It was an impressive display, just like the one I saw near Buckingham Palace. Gave me a bad feeling that London had won. I was telling my sis, 'No, no, pls don't let London win...' And she was hushing me cos' she was afraid that someone will beat me up for saying that. But I don't even think anyone cared... Then I saw a group of schoolboys and one of them was holding a tiny placard which said London won. I went up to them and asked and they said yes but I didn't want to believe that. I needed to ask someone else. So when we went to the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre where we were going to watch a play, I asked the receptionist and to my dismay, she said yes too. She also said it's going to be a disaster cos' Sydney is still paying off debts that she accumulated for hosting Olympics 2000. Would you just look at the 'enthusiasm' of the people?!?! So London did not deserve to win. Not that I have anything against London, I don't. It's just that I very much preferred Paris (after living here, before I think I might have supported London too). I suppose people just kinda get attached to places/countries they have lived in for some time, at least that's how I think I feel.
Have a look:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,160920,00.html