My Waterloo Sunset....

Although it rained cats and dogs because of the burgeoning typhoon, I was not annoyed at all. How could I complain? I mean, after all, I was definitely not a greedy person and got a day off on Monday would be completely enough. Therefore, with my satisfaction, I stuffed myself into a comfortable fluffly sofa with my rose tea and tried to find something interesting to learn from BBC News website and enjoyed the unearned day.

With such a versatile website, I always wished I had 48 hours a day to read everything. Before I could find any method or person to make my dream come true, I recently choose to focus on "The Flatmates" which provided educational and entertaining conversations that not only irrigated me with more advanced vocabulary, phrases and idioms but sometimes also reminded me of an exotic and memorable journey.

The memory came powerfully toward me just like the overwhelming wind and rain outside when I saw the idioms--It's daylight robbery. I smiled. I thought it would only appear in Chinese, but it was not the reason that I laughed. It was because I used to say it almost everyday when I was in the UK.

I remembered vividly that it was a sunny cloudless Sunday morning, I invited a friend to join in my first adventure in London to Spitalfield Market. She recommended fervently I tried a quite famous stall of hamburgers. A hot, juicy and with high calorie hamburger that was much more than I could expect in my first adventure in London. How great that was, especially after eating cold sandwiches for almost three days in Leeds, York and Manchester. That was definitely one of my dream food at that time. I was pretty quiet on our way to the market because my mouth was full of expectation.

I saw the queue before I got closer to the stall. It was absolutely a good sign--a long queue. I loved a long queue because it often suggested that the food was good, well, at least in my country. Although it was quite cruel I was only allowed to feel the hamburger until it was my turn to order, I still waited patiently. But the closer I got to the till, the more mysteries I had.

Why everything on the grill all heavily burned? Was it really the food that I was going to pay for? Or were they just some accidental imperfections that would not be sold to customers? It cost about 3 quid a hamburger so did that mean they burned the food in a completely tasty way?Well, like I said, I was definitely not a greedy person. The hamburger was good because at least it was totally hot and with high calorie.

That was the first time I said it's a daylight robbery in London. Besides food, there were lots of things I found they were insanely expensive compared to my country, such as flats, the tube, trains, toilets and so on. After watching my friend eating a 2 quid small ice cream without any guilt, I started wondering maybe it was a reward for working from 5PM to 3AM as a waitress in a fancy restaurant.

Luckily, I was not the only person to feel it was quite expensive to live in such a beautiful country and I could still find myself numerous and amazing enjoyments without costing any penny. All the free and wonderful memories might be in a certain way to explain why I yearned for going back to the UK again so much.

Listening to Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks from my IPod Nano, I spent my last night in London at the patio of Royal Festival Hall and tried to compose my own Waterloo Sunset. With a little sip of my homesick tea and a big bite of my unwilling-to-leave cake, I started to write a postcard to my family to tell them how much I gained from the journey and how grateful I was to have their support. I told them I was very proud of myself that I had done another special thing in my life and there was only one thing I felt regretful that was no matter how hard I tried to keep everything in my diary and took as many pictures as possible. There would still be no way to share all the marvelous experience I had with them.

Well, obviously, my mum was quite moved by my postcard. Although it was completely not my main purpose to send them a postcard like that, my mum still decided that after ten years from our last family overseas travel, we all went to Japan for a vacation after ten days I went back to Taiwan.