Inwit

WARNING: THIS IS NOT A HIATUS.

Bellwether------> Something that indicates a trend. I have just realised that I've found my fetish. I want my girlfriend to look good with a tail. Not the Little Mermaid kind of tail, more like the girl-with-a-fox-tail kind of girl.

Note: I'm not into furries.

Hi guys. Well I haven’t been blogging for so long simply because I went to London. Sorry I didn’t tell almost anybody about it, just left a message in my answering machine (if you even bothered to call me haha). Now, since my trip in London was especially long (8 days you know) I have decided to post this chapter-by-chapter to make it not so confusing and not look like a 1-paragraph novel.

Prelude: Before the trip

I was already pressured to make this trip a success about a few months before the trip itself. See some posts ago, I said something about going to watch Manchester United play at Old Trafford if I got more than 8A’s for SPM. I got 10. So I had a lot of planning to do. I had to book game tickets at Old Trafford, reserve a hotel in London (which my parents have never done), and find out stuff that we can do over in England. Unfortunately, my planning of events as such is not as effective and efficient as my dad (who is a really good businessman) so I got bombarded like hell for not being as good as him. At least I’ve learnt loads of stuff from him, and I would like to use this post as future reference in case something as serious as this comes up again.

1. Always have a fallback. I used to think that in whatever that I’m planning, I tell myself “Something WILL go wrong” according to Murphy’s Law. Now, I learnt that I actually have to work it out and predict myself what actually would go wrong. For example, when booking the tickets, my dad was absolutely furious at me for not checking the Terms & Conditions and stuff like that because there might be loopholes and he doesn’t trust that the ticketing agency is efficient enough in distributing the tickets on the day itself. He also didn’t trust our Internet connection and the distributing times of the tickets as well (which I didn’t think of and got bombarded again) so I had to double check that our tickets were firmly booked, secured, and guaranteed ours.
2. Always map out your CALLS. Like before you call someone that’s really really far overseas and you don’t wanna spend time thinking on the phone wasting precious pennies on “any other questions you wanna ask” So before the call, you actually write down what you wanna ask on the telephone. I was calling the ticketing agency for our tickets and I got mocked time and time again for not mapping out my calls.
3. IT DOESN’T HURT to do more. The tickets were supposed to be delivered 1 week before the game. 1-and-a-half weeks ago my dad and I started calling the ticketing agencies to make sure that the tickets weren’t accidentally gone or something. Turns out my dad was right. Well, almost. The tickets, in actual fact, were going to be delivered 2 days before the match itself.
4. Always LOG your options down in a file. My dad did a great job on that with his Adobe Acrobat, saving various hotel agency prices and ticket agency prices into his little document. Anything found on the net would just be zipped in there and compared later on.

Right, so after managing to book tickets for the game, it was time to search for a hotel in London. And book it. Sounds easy right? Think again. There were so many options to choose from, especially when the local tours factor in that your head was gonna spin. There were also a lot of places to go, making this trip a hard one. The most annoying part was finding the CHEAPEST price of a hotel. Firstly, there were so many hotels. Secondly, there were so many AGENCIES to choose from. Some came with tours, some came along with breakfast and whatnot. Thirdly (I really really didn’t expect this problem of such magnitude) was that the hotel prices INCREASE as the date approaches the date of booking. Now this would be simple to some, as the agency rates are about the same, but when you’re staying for 7 nights and booking 2 rooms, and you’re converting Ringgit Malaysia into UK Pounds (7 times for expensive), 12 pounds per room per night difference can hurt you a lot. So book early. Really early. In the end, we did so much dilly-dallying (due to my exams) that the prices inflated so high and we decided to call them directly and book. But it was a fun experience though, chasing hotels and all.

I decided to give up on the tours and trips, trusting our family’s instincts to have fun anywhere we go. I did look at a few good sites about London attractions such as Tate Modern, Theatres and Museums, and so on, but it was just too time consuming and I didn’t have that much time. I did have a few places to go in mind go, and during the trip we did go to most of the places.

Btw anyone knows where to find the super irritating advertisement on Gatsby deodorant that there’s one guy dancing with two tomatoes on the side? It’s incredibly hilarious.