South of England and Shanghai

Dear friends

How are you?

In your last posts I can already feel a slight scent of summer! Planning for (and enjoying!) vacations is always interesting, and that's what I also want to talk about in this post.

In the Easter weekend we (me, Lu and two Portuguese friends of mine) went for two days to the south coast of England. No very rigid plan, just one really defined objective, the Isle of Wight (just south of Southampton, by ferry boat), and the will to have a great time.

And I must tell you that the places we visited were quite interesting. I underline this because in many of the travels I and Lu made to different places in the UK, we had high expectations and when we got to those places we were quite disappointed. Examples are dreadful towns like Nottingham, Swindon or Cardiff - there's really nothing interesting there! Boring!!

But this time it was good. On the day of my birthday we checked out Poole and Bournemouth.

The best thing about both places is the coastline, the beaches seem like the nicest I ever visited in the UK and the towns themselves have nice houses and urban planning. In Poole it even seemed similar to the Cascais and Estoril areas near to Lisbon. Bournemouth is also a well known resort, with the natural attraction of a cliff running along the beach. I don't know about you but I always enjoyed beaches with cliffs, that's my thing :)

Then we got the ferry to Wight where we visited some picturesque sites conserved by the National Trust,

and a traditional wine farm with a funny reveration towards France :)

There the Portuguese have shown good skills on one of our favourite national sports, kicking defenseless animals!!

The last place we visited was the favourite vacation place for Queen Victoria and her Albert, the so called Osbourne House and respective estate, where I did some Zen meditation.

And that's it, at the end of the 2 days it's back to London and normal life!

Another matter is the plan me and Lu have for the near future. We'll both travel to Shanghai between the 24 April and the 8 May. Therefore we hope to meet at least Mikey and maybe Yasu also. Tell us something about your availability as soon as you can and we can plan a nice meet-again!!!!

Hugs for everybody