In my incredibly long post about my vacation - which incidentally is still in the midst of being completed as at this point in time, I haven't even spoken about Paris - I believe I mentioned how safe the lovely little city of Ljubljana is. Other than for my foray a little further south than tourists usually walk on my first night there, I never once felt threatened by anything. And, might I add, the only reason I felt nervous during that walk was because I wasn't sure where I was going and the streets were rather dark. Yes, another splendid example of my incredibly intelligence when it comes to travelling by myself. In my defence, I have to say that I was looking for the KUD France Preseren as it was the main concert venue for the Trnfest, Ljubljana's alternative music summer festival. I caught part of Liars' electro-rock performance and I have to say that I wasn't terribly impressed. They struck me as Radiohead-wannabes, except that Radiohead are much much better than Liars could ever be.

But I digress.

Anyway, after the safety of Ljubljana, I returned to London on Friday the 6th and had to make a tough choice between returning back to my brother's apartment and eating dinner with my family or rushing down to Somerset House and trying to get a ticket off a tout for Basement Jaxx's sold-out concert. Having been to one of the Jaxx's performances before, I was really hoping to catch this concert as "there's still no-one who throws a party quite like the Jaxx." (NME). But, owing to fatigue and my desire to go clubbing at Fabric later that night, I stayed home and ate dinner with my mother. It was around 8 pm at this point and I was waiting impatiently for my brother to get home so that we could leave and get to the club before 11 pm. South, the band which sang Paint the Silence, my favourite song off the soundtrack of The O.C., would be performing live, as would Adam Freeland and UNKLE. My brother was late as usual. As such, we left the apartment close to 11 pm, only to find that something - we weren't quite sure what - had occurred along the street just a block away from the apartment building. A man was lying on the road, the police were there and there were plenty of people around and various people yelling at each other. It was clear that this wasn't a place that we wanted to be around so my brother just urged me to walk faster. When we returned at 6 am on our way back from the club, the police were still there and this time, the road had been cordoned off. The officer on duty refused to tell us what had happened and took down our particulars as we walked through to get to the apartment. It wasn't until five hours later, on our way back out, that we found out that there had been a shooting the night before, most likely racially-motivated.

That incident really brought home the fact that I was indeed no longer in safe little Ljubljana (or Singapore for that matter) and back in London.