Overall, even with all the frustration and anxiety, I suppose this has been a good trip.

I got to see lots of historic architectures and learned a lot of English history, history which I couldn’t learn when I was in school. I also got to try the city life for the couple of days. I wasn’t a fan of it. The people and the crowds caused so much anxiety at times that I found myself slowing down or just stopping altogether, frozen in my tracks like a deer in the headlights, unsure what I was supposed to do at the moment.

At the end of the day, I still found myself yearning for home in the US. I missed my garden dearly, even more so after seeing mom’s friend’s allotment garden. I found it surprising that I prefer the slower suburbia life than the exciting city life, which I used to yearn in my younger days.

Even though I didn’t exactly enjoyed the London city life, it doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy the UK in general. I’m always a sucker when it comes to seeing historic sites, no matter which country or continent is on. I would love to see more of the UK in the future, just not the cities. I would love to see the Scottish highlands and the near-remote places of Northern Ireland and Ireland. There definitely are lots of places to see.

The thing that got me on this trip was the time difference. There is a 7-hour time difference between the UK and home. For the first few days, my internal clock was whacky, like I need to sleep when I’m supposed to awake and vice versa. Especially, when we were at the Tower of London. A few times, I almost fell over standing up because I was so sleepy.

I don’t ever remember having such a tough time getting over the time difference because when I visited China in 2017 and 2018, I had no problem getting over the 15-hour difference. Perhaps, it was because I didn’t have a rest period during this trip until the very end?

One thing I would do differently next time would probably be I would rent an apartment or a flat as opposed to staying in an hotel. Because we ate out a lot on this trip, my surgical site from my recent oral operation had become somewhat inflamed, so has my back and knees. I’m constantly depending on pain killers to keep the pain to a manageable level and the inflammation down. Therefore, I would opt for buying groceries and cooking myself as opposed to going out to eat to lower the chances for my chronically inflamed body to misbehave.

Another thing I would do different might be while I do prefer a travel companion, I do prefer to travel alone, especially when the companion is fussy.

…and that’s a wrap on my UK trip – 11 days of visiting historic sites, pretending to live a city life, and wondering about people past lives.

You can read the entire UK travel series by visiting this link.