London, almost one year on

Well, I never thought I'd find myself back in London in so short a time frame again, but I did! Wasn't quite sure what to expect this time round -as much as I love London, I knew that things might be different now that I'm not actually living there, but oh what the hell -I couldn't wait to see it again anyway. (:

And so I landed in Heathrow with my friends, topped up my old student Oyster card (and was pleasantly surprised to find that it still had £2.10 in it hehe) and got onto the Piccadilly Line (towards Cockfosters, please mind the gap) in order to get to our hostel at Russell Square. And I found myself in some sort of a paradox: I had just taken 14 hours to reach London, yet being on the tube it felt so normal, like I had never left -and yet it was so strange that it was so normal. And so it went for most of the time in London -walking down Torrington Place, Gower Street, Tottenham Court Road, Charing Cross Road, Oxford Street, Regent Street, visiting UCL, Waterstones, Sainsburys, Tesco, Giraffe, Kensington Creperie, the list could go on and on. Okay I think I'm just thinking too much -it is normal feel normal to be in London, after all, London's 'normal' was what I had lived in for the better part of 5 plus months.

Geez two paragraphs in and I'm rambling already.

Well, just to keep this short -it's hard to enjoy London in the short few days we had there, not that I didn't enjoy doing my favourite things, but I think the bulk of my enjoyment in London came from just living there and doing normal things, or looking for new events or places to go to, with my friends or alone -best carried out over long time periods, with a comfortable room to return to after each foray was completed. Good memories of London accumulated this time round -lights gently twinkling along the Thames reflected in the wet pavements, slowly walking in the darkened streets of Covent Garden after catching a musical -with the sounds of 'When You Say Nothing At All" drifting across from two men with a guitar, and as those sounds faded, that of a violin came to my ears, from a lady standing in a softly lit doorway, and after she was done a man standing a short distance away from her applauded her, which she gracefully acknowledged. Just little things like that, things that are hard to come across sometimes in Singapore. And I behave a little differently in London, little things that I'm glad to be reminded of.

I definitely did not get to visit all the places I wanted to linger in, bringing my friends around to the big attractions does deny the luxury of time. All the same, I was glad to be able to share London with my friends -I was really pleased when they all concluded that they liked London (I'm sorry Huishi that you had a miserable time back there) despite my terrible tour-guiding skills ("That's Nelson's Column, I'm not sure what Nelson did but yeah that's his column." "Mmm yeah and that's another monument -I don't know what it is") and my apparently warped sense of distance that one tends to develop in London (i.e. everywhere seems to be 'walkable' to) (:

And there isn't really any point to this post I realised, just that London will always be there even if I'm not, and I'm so pleased to have had the chance to experience the city through SEP (a special spatial-temporal experience), it's strange to realise that there's another city so far away that I know about as well as Singapore (well, not really just as well as Singapore -more of in terms of navigation and survival skills).

Looking forward to finding myself back there one day again (: