One cannot go to London and NOT SEE Westminster Abbey !  To do so would be a grand disservice to your trip. I mean how can you not experience the  most important (and heck, oldest) church in London :  site of coronations, burials, memorials, and lookalike to every Citadel in our dreams?! Yeah, I'm a big fan of this place. So big that I purposely and happily went here thrice in the two times that I've visited London! *  Taking the tube  to Westminster and  getting off Westminster Station , short and sweet!! While I greatly appreciated the presence of English all around (compared to everywhere else in Europe), I must say that  I found the Paris Metro to be more navigable compared to the London Tube . Must be because the Metro uses a numbering system (Get off the 6, Hop on the 9) compared to the system of the Tube which uses named lines (Jubilee Line... Jubilee Line.. Wait, what I am doing on the Metropolitan Line?!)

Across the river from the London Eye stands  Westminster , England's  political and religious center . Since the  11th Century , Westminster has proudly been the center of power for the English people from the moment  King Canute built his palace  here and his successor,  Edward the Confessor , founded Westminster Abbey right beside it . On a regular day, expect to see crowds of civil servants and tourists coexisting in this tiny yet hallowed area. * Taken from Parliament Square is this shot of  Parliament on the right  and the  Norman Shaw Buildings , the original site of the famous  Scotland Yard  synonymous with Sherlock Holmes and detective work,  on the left .

Being a big fan of  Sherlock Holmes , the movie  Eurotrip , British musicians such as the  Beatles , Coldplay  etc, and  British imperial history , I knew that  London  would be the  pinnacle of any European sojourn.  There are just too many places here that I wanted to see! However to have the chance to  visit the city twice in two years  (one with family in 2012, the other for work in 2013), gave me a good appreciation of what this city has to offer. And like any traveler in the good old days, I did what any newcomer in a strange locale was expected to first do upon arriving, and that is to   pay my respects to the Sovereign . *  Buckingham Palace  is known the world over as the  official residence of the British Monarchy . As you can see in the succeeding photographs, there is a  huge difference   between the size of the crowd last year (2012) and this year (2013). When I visited last year, it was about the time that the London Olympics had just ended and for some r

As an added bonus to what was already an awesome trip, we were able to visit an honest-to-goodness  Scottish castle ! Built in  1546 ,  Ballindalloch , known affectionately as the  Pearl of the North , is one of the more beautiful and romantic-looking castles in Scotland. Having been continuously occupied by the  Macpherson-Grant family  since its inception, the estate and its grounds are now open to the public as a museum, distillery, public garden, golf course, dog walking park and ranch serving its own renowned Angus beef. * Driving by  Lord of the Rings-esque   landscapes  on the way to the castle. I'm pretty sure that there are orcs / barbarians / vikings hiding in that forest.

The second stop on our whiskey tour was the   Glenlivet Distillery , producer of the renowned Glenlivet single-malt (duh!). Known as the  "single malt that started it all,"  Glenlivet is currently the  biggest selling single malt brand in the US   and is personally my favorite single-malt scotch. * This sign goes to show how all of our beloved scotch whiskey brands are just literally,  neighbors .