London, UK

To rewind a bit:

We started off in London for 4 days (but effectively 3 days of exploring). It was my second time visiting (first in 2004), so I could tour guide without much trouble. The first evening we had dinner in Chinatown with Crystal (my sister), and two of my father's cousins' families. (We were actually staying at Uncle Kay's place in southwest London, near Wimbledon.)  Everyone looks older now.

Crystal managed to join us for most of the first day (Tower of London) before whisking off to Rome, Italy. Holly and I watched the Changing the Guard at Buckingham Palace (in the rain) and Westminster Abbey the next day, and St. Paul's Cathedral and the British Museum the day after. One thing I found different from my first visit was how much time we spent *in* these attractions--I covered a lot more ground in '04 when I was visiting alone. This time we spent more time actually touring entire facilities (especially the paid ones).  Eight years ago (has it really been that long?) I must have spent only half the time in each attraction just to make sure I covered everything.

On the second evening we also headed to the Olympic Park for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games (in July/Aug).  I had managed to score some tickets to women's water polo matches for the London Prepares Series--a series of sporting events to test the venues (security, crowd control, scoring, etc) before the official Games.  We had never watched water polo before.  The matches were the first day's games: USA vs. Hungary, and Australia vs. UK.  It is such an interesting sport; the fact that you could physically push/pull opposing teams' players under water so that they don't receive the ball was astounding to us.  These ladies were quite athletic, even though the USA team's players were somewhat hefty and round.  Perhaps this helped with the objective mentioned earlier.  USA and Australia won their respective matches for the evening, and to our untrained eyes it looked like USA was by far the best team and UK the worst, though in checking the final matches it looks like Australia beat out USA for gold.

The Olympic Park seemed nice and new, but we really had no time to explore (not to mention that it was cold and windy).  Massively new shopping centre (yes, reverting to UK spelling here) built by Westfield (apparently an Australian company), reminding me of the one back home in Tukwila, WA.

Marks & Spencer was everywhere.  They sell food too?!  In little, extremely convenient packages for take-away (or to-go) packages.  Very affordable too.  Same for a japanese/sushi place we went to near the London Stock Exchange & St. Paul's.  They should bring this style of store back to the USA.

People smoke a lot.  Ugh.

Londoners were also a lot more rude than I remember.  Some lady came off the underground and seemingly purposely bumped into Holly.  wtf.

There really wasn't enough time to explore London properly; such a big city.  Even with full day travelcards, we were already walking a lot, short on time, and bushed by the end of each day.

Uncle Kay and his wife were super gracious hosts: ferrying us around in his car, driving around downtown in the evening just to show us sights, treating us to dinner and dim sum, cooking a home-cooked meal for us on Friday, and of course, letting us stay in their house.  I've always liked them since meeting them the first time I visited London.