Days 28 and 29 were skipped because I literally just spent the two whole days at Kenzie’s flat with his parents. On the Internet. No surprises there.
On Saturday, I had tickets booked for Madame Tussauds and London Eye so Kenzie and I headed for Central London. We took the DLR at Beckton to Canning Town where we switched to the Underground Jubilee Line. I was lucky because since I was going to be exploring London alone, it was easy to go to all the places I wanted to go since all of them are reachable by the same Underground line, the Jubilee line.
From Canning Town, it was about half an hour tube ride to Baker Street where we collected my tickets before heading for Green Park by tube. There, Kenzie left me to do the exploring while he went off to sort out his stuff. I was quite antsy and nervous because it was my first time exploring a whole foreign city by my own, and I’ll be commuting between places and also there were so many people in London! It was also the day of the Championship League or something so the tubes and streets were filled with people in red and yellow singing and shouting in German.
After coming out of the Green Park station, I arrived at Buckingham Palace in time to witness part of the changing of guards. Again, there were SO MANY people!
After that, I took the tube back to Baker Street and I entered Madame Tussauds. It was so packed. And what can you say about wax figures, really? I was only really excited at One Direction’s figures and it was at a separated section so you could choose to take photos with them or not and the ones lining up to do so were ALL teenage girls. Like me. So. And they were playing 1D songs so that was nostalgic because YES, I haven’t listened to 1D in a really long time wow shocking. But I liked my photo with them so much that I bought, a photo, a magnet and a keychain of the photo for 12 pounds. I’m what Aunty Sue would say, “a sucker”.
After the walk around the wax displays by foot, there was a Spirit of London ride and then I went into the Marvel Superheroes 4D Experience theater which was pretty cool.
At around 3PM I left Madame Tussauds and headed for the Sherlock Holmes museum at 221B Baker Street after picking up an egg mayo sandwich (literally that’s all I eat at England, egg mayo sandwiches) at Pret A Manger. The queue wasn’t long but it was a long wait because they only allowed about 10 to 15 people into the house at a time. That was understandable, considering how rickety the building was. The floorboards creaked wherever you stepped and everything was so quaint and delicate.
After that, it was to the Underground station again to take a tube to Waterloo for my London Eye trip. I got lost for a while after exiting the station but with the help of people at the station and phone calls to Kenzie, I finally found the London Eye. I was pretty reluctant to go up the London eye because I was antsy at great heights and also there were so many people. But I went in anyway after waiting for an hour and a half and can you believe it??? There were three Malaysians in the same pod as mine! They were a family, a mother, a father and a daughter, who were standing behind me in the queue. My interest was piqued because they were conversing in Malay so at first I thought they were Indonesian because they looked Chinese. But then I caught a bit of Mandarin too so I was pretty skeptical. In the pod I asked them to help me take my photo with my camera in Malay and they were shocked, it was quite funny. So I said I was Malaysian and they said they were too, from Sabah. They were here for 12 days, and the daughter was taking SPM this year. She was here to scout for colleges. I honestly thank god and all the heavenly powers above because their presence made me feel…calmer? to take my mind of my nerves. I call these moments unicorn moments. And I was still thinking about it on the tube all the way to Stratford to meet Kenzie and his parents.
I also saw a lot of cosplayers on the streets especially at Canning Street because of the MCM Comic Con. I saw Link (Legend of Zelda), Mario, Finn (Adventure Time) and Jack Frost. The DLR station at Canning Street was FULL of them. And also a lot of people in red and yellow because of the championship league at Wembley Stadium.
I’m not even going to deny that I was anxious the whole time I was alone. But I told myself to just keep going with the schedule and it’s ok, there’s always people to help. In the end, as I arrived at the station at Stratford, I was happy and triumphant. I managed to complete all tasks on my schedule without chickening out. It might not be very impressive to many but it was a start for me. Something Brianna Cuocco once tweeted was also my constant source of motivation: Feel the fear and DO IT ANYWAY.
ADVENTURES!!!!!!
michelle teoh 