Hello! It has been FOUR YEARS since I last wrote here. Sooo many things have happened since the last post. It’s the start of 2022, so I thought may be this is a good time to restart! Plus, going into the third year of the pandemic definitely made me think all the pre-pandemic years when we could freely travel =(
At the end of September 2018, I flew back to Malaysia after a year in London. I made tons of good memories there I want to record some of the highlights that made my year. So, you could say, this is more of a photo blog post than an essay blog post?
On hindsight, I’m glad I decided to went ahead with the trip when my initial plan to reconnect with a friend did not materialize. I got lucky to have had a very friendly Airbnb host who brought me to this most amazing New Year’s fireworks I had ever seen in my life, I kid you not! And when we got back, he cooked me a lentil based Czech dish traditionally eaten on a new year. We were both genuinely sad when it was time to part!
From Prague, I took a bus to Berlin and met Aimi and her son as planned. She took me to the museums and castle after castle which were all extravagant and decadent! It was very cold, I remember, and I wasn’t at all conversant in German (four years of taking up the language does very little when you don’t practice it lol), so I was definitely glad to have a friend who knows her way around the city! Before I knew it, it was time to fly back to London. Such is student life boooo.
Classes resumed in January, 2018. The next month, Shamini and I went on a trip to Cirencester, a sleepy town in Gloucestershire, hours away from London. We also took a short bus trip to Cheltenham, although that bit was actually unplanned hah.
It felt like I was transported to old England in the medieval time! Both places are rich in history so we checked out the museums and historical spots as many as we could. You can see we were smiling up there but we were actually pretty lost that one time haha!
Back in London, I resumed checking out the art museums with friends in between classes.
Then came Chinese New Year middle of February 2018. I love my CNY experience. My Law & Society in Southeast Asia classmate from China invited me over to her hostel for a CNY dinner and it was definitely a fun do with new faces from different parts of the world. The Malaysians, some of us, decided to cook up a storm and that was another fun day! I think being able to get together with fellow Malaysians to do something that reminds us of things back home has a special feeling attached to the whole experience.
London was still freezing and snowy so of course I had fun playing in the snow on the way to class and the library hehe.
Every time it snowed we would just stare out the window as snow flakes slowly but steadily (though sometime quite aggressively!) blanket the ground below. I sure am glad it snowed that year!
snapshots 