Winter Wonderland, London

We wanted to go to Winter Wonderland, which is in Hyde Park, which is just minutes away on foot from our hotel. We wanted to go at night, to see the lights and the beauty of sparkling lights in the dark night. The problem was, we became tired so easily because of jet lag and maybe old age. When the sun went down around 4 PM, our eyes got heavier and our body screamed for the rest badly. Every night, we fell asleep early, 6-7 PM then we woke up around 2AM and struggled to sleep again and normally failed. We were exhausted. We had no energy left. After a few nights, we forced ourselves to stay awake and walked out of the door to Hyde Park. It was dark, it was cold, but we were quite excited to finally be able to "stay up". Yes, we were proud to be able to walk outside at 4:30 PM, kept our eyes opened and took some pictures. It's a victory. Finally. We saw darkness, we saw lights. 

Adventure Day

Monday morning, after breakfast, we went to the complex of Universal Parks, parked our car for $12. The parking lot is gigantic, we were directed to park at King-Kong lot. By the time we arrived at around 8:50 AM, a lot of people started to arrive as well. It probably took us 10-15 minutes before we arrived at the main entry after passing through City Walk that appears to be smaller and shorter than the one in Universal City, Hollywood.



My little group made a decision to start with Islands of Adventure, one of the two parks there. There are five islands featuring fun and adventure, called Marvel Super Hero Island, Toon Lagoon, Jurassic Park, The Lost Continent and Seuss Landing. Basically, we are talking about the rides, the fun, the crowd, the show, being wet, cute looking stuff, the typical overpriced food and souvenirs.

And wait, and wait..... for your turn. A tiring, but exciting and happy day!

26th Day

Today marked the 26th day of us being in the USA this Summer. After such a long drive and going places around the East Coast and Midwest for 21 days, we flew down south to Orlando for a holiday that feels more like the one that we had prior to coming here.

Orlando gives us such a great feeling, the atmosphere is fantastic, it is a tourist place but yet I don't feel like being in a tourist-y type of place. I know I don't explain myself well here, but for the first time in a long time, I really like the place I am visiting right now. When we came here two and a half years ago, we stayed at Disney resort and only visited Disney parks, which was too much too handle already. But now, we discovered so much more of Orlando.

Unlike our previous visit here, we now drive, therefore we see places that we didn't see before. We can see the wide clean roads, the parks around, the restaurants by the road, the hotels, etc. Driving here is definitely much more relaxing compared to driving around Chicago, Boston or New York. People are not necessarily friendlier than those in other places that we have been to, they just respond differently. Most of them are visitors, coming with the kids or older parents and everyone is busy looking out for each other.

In the theme parks that we went to, we saw many groups of teenagers coming from Brazil and probably some other countries from the southern part of the continent. We saw people from many other countries as well. People that work in the hotels, restaurants, parks mostly come from outside Orlando too. It is almost like a melting pot to me.

In my humble opinion, this is definitely an international place where you can also find food from various origins from all over the world. Your need for food is well taken taken care of here. Aside from the regular establishments that you can find elsewhere like Denny's. Uno's Chicago Grill, Taco Bell, TGIF, Olive Oil, Cheesecake Factory, etc, there are plenty of Chinese, Thai, Indian, Vietnamese, Brazilian, Mexican, Italian restaurants, etc.

Orlando is also a great place to shop. We have visited a couple of their super-fantastic malls: Florida Mall and Mall at Millenia. They also have an excellent selections at their Factory Outlets: Orlando Premium Outlets and Prime Outlets. It is definitely so hard to go home empty handed, giant sale signs are everywhere! Even when you do not need anything, you are likely end up buying something. Target shops and Wal-mart stores are within the vicinity too.

I definitely want to come back here for more. It is no wonder that the region estimated a total of more than 52 million visitors a year, there's so much of everything for everybody.