London: Buckingham Palace

If you are in London, spare a couple of hours to watch the Changing The Guards at Buckingham Palace! It's a performance never to be missed!

We went to Buckingham Palace twice when we were there. The first time, it was on the first day we arrived, when my parents and Alwin hadn't come yet. At that time, we had visited the entire London on foot and Buckingham Palace was one of our last stops. When we arrived that time in the afternoon, we saw a lot of people dressed very formally and fancily, queuing up to enter the main gate. A policeman told us that the Queen was having a garden party that evening. It was surprising to see the attendees all bringing their passports to attend the party! Hmm, when the Queen visits Perth this September for the CHOGM meeting, I will have to ask her why she did not invite me to her party! Gee... Anyway, as a royal princess, I think I should make all my attendees wear formal attire for the man, and cocktail dress and a fancy hat for the women, and they have to bring their passports for identity verification! Lalalalala. :P

Anyway, back to the Changing of the Guards. Having watched the Changing of the Guards at Tiananmen Square in Beijing before, we assumed that this would take at most 15 minutes. After all, it's just guards taking on their shifts! How complicated can that be? Oh boy, I was wrong. So wrong. It took us about an hour or so because the "procedure" was so elaborated! Not only were they changing the guards, a whole group of guards were marching in with their rifles, stomping their feet to the ground, doing some rifle performance, and another group of guards marching in with their musical instruments and playing a band for a good 15 minutes or so. By the end of the performance, I had used up 3Gb of my memory card and even used my iPhone to record the last part when the guards marched out from the palace.

The band

Having my parents, Alwin, Chin Fei and I, all standing at different spots around the compound, each armed with a camera, meant that we had thousands of pictures from different angles! It was sure a free memorable performance for us! Watch the two video recordings below and decide for yourselves! (Dislike the person standing next to me at that time, speaking in the background when I was recording).