Heyyyyyy everyone! It’s me again 🙂 It feels so good to be able to sit here and blog at this time so I get to escape from reality for awhile 😛 Dissertation writing process has been proceeding okay. I’m having a really mixed feeling now, on one hand I really hope that September will come soon so that I could be free after submitting my dissertation, but on the other hand, I hope it won’t come forever cause I will need to move out by September, which means I’m officially done and will be leaving Surrey 🙁

Anyways, today I’m going to share with you all on a Garden Party that I attended last Saturday. The Garden Party was organised by Friends International, which is a local non for profit Christian organisation that reaches out to International Student for friendship and gives them support. They hosted many activities and events along the year and this is just one of it. 🙂

The garden party was held in a house in Elstead, which is a neighboring town. The team is so kind hearted and they sent a minivan and local families to pick us up in front of GSA and drove us all the way to Elstead. Upon arriving, there are already many local British families welcoming us and prepared scrumptious tea for us. We were so excited and started to wonder around the garden, enjoying the beautiful view and sunshine. Everyone started to take out their cameras and snap away, so did we! 😛

Before the tea session, we had the privilege to visit a cottage in the village, which is almost 500 years old now! The house owners are really welcoming and showed us around the house and explained some history of the house. 🙂 Me and my friends were so amazed to see how good the house is still maintained despite it’s age and also the structure of the house. It is built in such a way that I have never seen and it has so many special floors, stairs and rooms. There is also gateball props in the garden and again it’s my first time seeing this and so I got excited again and started to play around with my friends. 🙂

We then went back to the first house for tea! Who doesn’t love English teas 😛 We were so blessed as the families have prepared a lot of good food for tea. We gathered and sat in a circle in the garden and chat away with the local families and friends while enjoying our tea. That’s the moment when I understood why English people love teas and picnic/sitting in the garden under the sun so much because it’s really relaxing! 🙂 Although the sun is really strong like Malaysia, it’s still different as there is still cold breeze which makes it really comfortable. I remembered sharing with the locals saying that I won’t even walk under the sun for 5 minutes in Malaysia cause I’ll be sweating so much and feel so sticky after that, which is really unpleasant! They also have a mini motor exhibition in the house whereby there is a few motors exhibited which is from decades ago. 🙂

Before heading home, we also walked to a nearby riverside. There were people feeding ducks and the view is just superb. 🙂 I just want to say a million thanks to the wonderful people in Friends International for showing us so much kindness and the willingness to spend time with us. The friendship and generosity shown towards us gave me a really good impression of the British people and make me love UK even more. 🙂 I’m starting to miss everything in UK even before leaving. 🙁

I guess that’s all for today. Gonna go back to dissertation writing again so see you all again next week! 🙂

Love xx

Adeline