Wednesday, 28 January 2009

London, revisited on 23th January


_1020367, originally uploaded by lhy709.

I remember that the last time I visited London as a tourist was in 2003 when Phoebe was doing her master at Essex. To be honest to you, I don't like London. As I told Adrian that night that London is the last place I wanna go in the UK since I'm not fond of big cities especially a place as disordered as London. I think this is the reason why I like Yorkshire so much. If you ever came the Yorkshire, you'd see so many beautiful scenes there particularly the north part of the North Yorkshire such as the North Yorkshire Moor. You can hike or take the locomotive train from Pocklington. Beyond that, you can also decide to go further north to Scotland or west to the Peak District and Lake District. In York, you can visit the City Wall which was built for resisting Vikings and some medieval Minster, churches, buildings, towers, bars, and stone-paved streets. Therefore, convenience is not a point to me. If you have a car, you can drive further to buy living stuff. But if you live in a place that the property price is about twice of Yorkshire and the living cost is also amazing, then you must be crazy.

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Also, I have to admit that I don't really know what to see in London. All I know are the basic touring spots such as Buckingham Palace, Tower Bridge and the castle beside it, St. Paul's Cathedral, Trafagal Square, Covent Garden, the canal near the King's Cross Railway Station, Big Bang, Westminster, the Parliament, Tate Modern Art Museum, British Museum and London Eye. Because it was just one day trip there and our aim was to meet Myra, we simply picked the Big Bang, Westminster, London Eye, Parliament and St. Paul's Cathedral to visit. St. Paul's Cathedral is the one that Dr. Kim suggested as the "must-not-miss-place" because I can see the great London area from the top of it and also fabulous painting works on the roof of the dume. Besides, it looks quite differnet form other Gothic cathedrals as you can normally see everywhere in the UK. Phoebe didn't get into the Cathedral with me cus she had been there at least twice! She was amazed by my quick-view of this Cathedral becasue I just spent less than one hour to finish it. The tip is I went to the top first then walked down to the other areas. Now that it is not allowed to take photos, then everything is not that attractive to me.

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We were lucky that day because it was heavily cloudy while we were on the way to London in the morning then it turned clearly sunny in the afternoon and everything suddenly became different. As you can see, most of the coloured pictures were took in the afternoon.

We took the tube to the Leicester Square after leaving the St. Paul's Cathedral. Phoebe was happy to buy some snackes from Paul, a famous french dessert shop. It's understandable that there are several "Paul"s surounding the St. Paul's Cathedral. We visited the China Town near Leicester Square and bought a pack of noodle there, then took a walk to Covent Garden since it was about 6 minutes away by foot. The sky was still clear at dusk which made Covent Garden more fascinating.

One night at Covent Garden

Some shops were still on sale on that day like Camper, Fossil and so forth (I don't know much about brand names......). Especially the British Pound is crunched at this moment, tourists but not us, may find things are much cheaper than before. Anyways, it was a good experience to take a lazy walk on the streets in London that afternoon and bathe in the sunlight. We felt warmer after receiving the stuff Myra brought for us from Taiwan--Nougat candies and 南棗核桃糕--both are good things!!! But I think that we'll consume all of them within one week XD

All in all, the revisit of London brought me some good experiences this time, but that doesn't mean that I like this place. If I could choose, I wouldn't mind to stay in countryside and be a country bumpkin. To live in a place like York or a small town in North Yorkshire, that's called life ^^


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