Ahh.. My weekend excursion to London.. If it weren't for my dear friend M, I wouldn't have gone.. At times I doubted that going to London was such a good idea in the first place, but looking back, I wouldn't miss it for the world..
So I went to take a National Express coach to London at 5.45pm from Southampton Coach Station.. I went with M and N.. To cut a (gross) story short, I got motion sickness and threw up all over myself in the bus.. Yup.. No bags, no tissues, nothing.. It was a smelly free for all.. And since we were still a good 30 minutes away from London's Victoria station, I just sat there in a horrible state of smell.. Urgh.. Yucks.. N was kind enough to give me some water to wash myself up but since it wasn't working so well (read: not enough water), I just gave up and waited till we got there :S
As soon as we arrived, I changed into some clean clothes and offloaded my dirty laundry to someone who enjoys FREE laundry facilities courtesy of Imperial College.. (There, you happy now? BTW, thanks! :P)
I stayed over at my ex-chaletmate's place at Frances Gardner House which is really nice.. Her room is lovely and her kitchen is massive.. Unfortunately, the fire alarm rang at 3am in the morning so we all had to step outside in the freezing cold for quite some time :P
The next morning, she left for Cambridge to celebrate Eid with her family there so I tagged along with L to our college's mini-gathering.. We were the first people to get to Malaysia Hall, our meeting point.. A few minutes later, a few people started to show up and after some time, the whole lounge was full of familiar faces :)
Once everyone's done with the customary catch-up conversations, we walked to Hyde Park and sat next to a beautiful lake. The guys played with the ducks while everybody else, well, snapped pictures :P
Afterwards, we all went to Nahar Cafe for their open house.. Free food! Imagine a long line of hungry people standing outside the restaurant, where most of them are ex-KYUEMans :P We had rice, ayam masak merah, nasi himpit, beef rendang, mee rebus, kuih and air bandung.. Yummy :)
At night, we girls went to Oxford Street.. It was then when I had my first experience of doing my prayers in a fashion store's dressing room :P Later, we went to the Tower Bridge, where we took loads of pictures.. It was also at this moment that we had the unfortunate incident of having raw eggs thrown at us.. We were looking for the toilets and we had to walk through this fairly deserted alley to get there.. In the middle of the alley, some sick black kids began throwing eggs at us.. L started to cry out "Telur! Telur!" and we ran away like mad.. Although at that moment, I'm pretty sure everybody felt terribly scared for their own safety, but looking back, I think the way we all ran in itself was pretty funny :D Moral of the story : Never walk through deserted alleys and it helps to have a male in your group :P
The next day, we all went to MSD's open house in Porchester Hall, a huge, beautiful hall that's fit for 600 people.. We ate the usual Raya delicacies which included a cake sponsored by the function's VIP, the Sultan of Pahang.. There was even an emcee who'd go around with a microphone and get students to make dedications.. Really cool.. But 2 hours into the function, he'd start to ask visitors to "leave the hall and let other people who are waiting outside to join in the festivities".. But nobody heeded his call and continued chatting away with friends.. It wasn't until he announced that there was about 150+ people outside, waiting in line that we all started to make our way out.. After that, it was a mad dash to Victoria Coach Station to catch our 6.30pm coach to Southampton..
My visit to London was truly memorable.. Next stop, Nottingham :)
P/S : All pictures taken from Nadia Iryani's fotopages
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NHA at 7:33 PM ::
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