Stream of thoughts...

Last Saturday was my grandpa's memorial, he has passed away for almost 10 years now. I forgot about it. I feel a little bit sad that I had forgotten about it and maybe little bit of guilt. I love my grandparents a lot, mostly because I and my sister spent all our childhood with them. In my mind, I still can see my grandpa carried me on his back, running around the house while my sister waited for her turn. I always remember what he taught me when I did something wrong (after punishment of course). My grandpa was tough and severe but at the same so much understanding and loving. I have wondered why a person's existance can be vanished as if he or she had never been existed even though I believe in the life beyond ours.

My grandma is a great woman. She is strong (considering the difficult time she went through when my grandparents lost everything and my grandpa was put into prison) and protective. She used to tell me "it was unfortunate for me that I could not go to school as a girl, but now you girls are lucky to have this chance, please take it seriously". I am very proud of her, she took lessons afterwards at the church near our place to learn how to read and write, then she read the famous book in Vnese literature, "Truyen Kieu" by Nguyen Du. I always find that cool ;-).

I have finished reading two very nice books recently, one calle "A long way gone-Memoirs of a boy soldier" by Ishmael Beah and another one "Remember me"? by my favourite author, Sophie Kinsela. Ishmael is a young writer (he is 28 years) but his way of telling stories is really beautiful and picturesque, it is happy and sad at the same time. In some parts, I thought I was living a part of his memory as if it was mine. I read and hear myself said "hey, that's what I did when I was young, too". Sophie Kinsela was of course the writer of women books, the author of the whole serie "Shopaholic" that recently the first one was made to big the screen. "Remember me?" was especially good because the main character fell in a accident and when she woke up she found out that it was 3 years after :-) but in reality, for other people, she was only in a coma for 5 days, she suffers amnesia ;-), fo course many things changes...etc. It's interesting to wake up one day and realise that you don't remember anything that occured 3 years in the past ;-).

I am looking forward to a friend's visit this weekend. Normally, it was planned last weekend but she couldn't find the flight ticket, so it will be this one. Of course, due to this change, I had to cancel my participation to a kajak trip ;-(, I really hope that we could organise it in Jun again. As the result of all this changing plans, I have become "the one who is difficult when it comes to scheduling" and the crown was passed to me. Damn it! I have to work on passing it to someone else! or maybe passing it back ;-)

The famous Meridian line in Greenwich

London

As mentioned earlier, we set out for London last weekend. Since it was a long weekend (1st of May is a bank holiday in Belgium), we left around 6pm after work and headed to Calais to get the ferry to Dover, and then drove all the way to Peterborough. We arrived at Peterborough quite late, had some dinner, went to bed. The next day, took a coach to London (about 2h).

London is such a nice city, a lot of parks, where you can sit or lay down enjoying the sun (luckily we had very good weather). With the weak pound, it does not seem to be as expensive as people describe earlier. Unfortunately, we did not spend a lot of time to shop ;-(, I would have loved to check out some shoes and dresses there. They look really nice behind the shops' windows. I think I have to have to London trip dedicated for shopping! London is of course big, plus there are plenty of things to see and to do, so two days and one night was really not enough. I would have loved to go to a comedy musical such as The Phantom of the Opera, that I liked so much...will be for next time I guess.

We, fortunately decided to go to Greenwich, which was very interesting. I wonder where were all those genius in our time go?