This entire month has been content from my Europe trip! I hope you’ve enjoyed following along. I know I enjoyed following along my dad on his business trip to Cambridge, which was the whole reason for this whirlwind trip through three cities in ten days. (You might be thinking, hold up Audrey, according to your blog posts, you spent two days in each city so how does that add up? Well, if you take into account travel days and the one lost day in London, it amounts to roughly ten days.)

In high school, I had a trip to Brussels for a choir festival and we had arrived a day earlier than we needed, so my choir and I made a day trip to Bruges. I remembering being very salty about that, because our “rival” school also arrived a day early and they got a day trip to Paris! (I put “rival” in quotation marks, because that school was my school’s rival for athletics and stuff, but not for choir festivals because choir festivals are about coming together lol.) Anyways, after many years, I’ve made it to Paris at last!

Of Cambridge, London, and Paris, I was most excited for London! I probably would have been most excited for Paris, but I had been warned that Paris might not be as wonderful and magical and romantical as I might imagine, so I muted my anticipation to protect myself from feeling disappointed. Thus, London! I scoured blogs for recommendations and was especially looking forward to having fabulous brunches and afternoon teas. Alas, Dalloway Terrace, Sketch, and Sanderson were all booked for the days we were in London. But no matter! There was plenty else to do…

I’m… one of those people… who just… take pictures of flowers… And blog about them… And I don’t even know anything about flowers!! Thus, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to devote a whole blog post to the Cambridge University Botanic Garden, because what the heck would I write about? (That’s also probably why I never blog about museums.) But I loved these photos too much, and there were too many of them to cram into my 2 days in Cambridge blog post, which was already quite long. So here it is! A blog post about flowers!

Dad had a conference in Cambridge, so the rest of the family tagged along for a vacation. Yay! We only had two days in Cambridge, but it seems that most people say that there’s not much to do in Cambridge anyway, except visit colleges and go punting, so the time that we had was plenty. Though, I quite like the pace of life in Cambridge and wouldn’t have minded spending a few extra cosy days there.

I haven’t been doing anything this summer break, so I randomly got the idea to visit Sheena (my best friend) in Shanghai, since I’m already in Beijing anyway. Well, the idea wasn’t so random. I was talking to her about the Benjamin Francis Leftwich concert in Beijing that I was considering going to (like I mentioned in my May-in-review blog post). The only thing was that I couldn’t find anyone to go with. Then we realised that Benjamin Francis Leftwich would be in Shanghai too, so Sheena was also wishing she could make the concert, if only she could find someone to go with. If only the two of us were in the same city!

Well… I made it to Shanghai! Not in time for the concert, but I made it nonetheless. My friend Grace was also in Shanghai, so I decided to pop by and meet both of them.