In my eagerness to write about the last three weeks back in London and Berlin, I realise I left my Best of 2011 hanging.  And so, finally, here’s the third installment, capturing the best of my journeying between late Summer to mid-Autumn.

During this period, I caught up with very old friends in and around London, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Hanover, Gothenburg and Paris; I briefly lost the one thing that was most important to me but managed to retrieve it; I finally said farewell to London and moved to New York, and I flew home to Singapore for my only brother’s wedding.

It was a sunlit, rain-drenched, eventful, agonising, hopeful, traumatic, and totally confusing three months.

雨，像银灰色黏湿的蛛丝，织成一片轻柔的网，网住了整个秋的世界 。（民国   张爱玲     《秋雨》）

An old friend’s birthday party in the beautiful Cotswolds

My local (Starbucks) near Weymouth St, London

The Camden Locks, London

A ferry on the mighty Elbe River, heading into Hamburg

HafenCity, Hamburg, with a view of the stunning new concert hall designed by Herzog & de Meuron

Miniature Wonderland, Hamburg – the largest miniature railway system in the world.  I loved it!

Ancient architecture in Jork, Altesland, Lower Saxony

Sunset over Stade, another mediaeval town in Altesland, Lower Saxony

At the mud-flats in Wattenmeer National Park, Schleswig-Holstein

Marienburg Castle, outskirts of Hanover

With two dear friends at the Grounds of the Herrenhausen Palace in Hanover, the ancestral seat of the Hanoverian and English Monarchs.

View of the Machsee – a vast artificial lake commissioned by Hitler in Hanover

Braunchsweig (Brunswick), a small mediaeval city near Hanover

Hanging out with a good friend, on a sunny afternoon in Gothenburg, Sweden

The rejuvenated historic district of Haga, Gothenburg

The Moulin Rouge, Paris

Farewell to London – view from a cab heading towards Heathrow Airport

Hello New York – view of Manhattan from the East River Ferry

A wedding at the family home, Singapore

Back in New York in time for Fall colours on The High Line