I was attacked!

I think ill get this over with. Ill start with what happened at the end of the day rather than the start of the day. Bad news before the good news first.
 I arrived at Coventry from London at around 10pm and decided to use the shortcut going to our house. As soon as I stepped on the pathway coming from Tesco car park, I saw two figures from afar sitting on their bikes. I didnt mind that they were there and continued walking towards them. As I was walking in front of them, I noticed that both of them were staring at me. One of them was wearing his hood on. I cant make how he looks like but the other one was a young male with blonde hair. I thought it was very rude that they were staring at me and so I looked away and continued to walk past them. A few seconds after, I heard one of them cycling behind me slowly. The first thing that came to my mind was he wanted to cycle past me that is why I inched closer to the side of the pathwalk to make way for him. However, he didnt take advantage of the space i gave him and continued to cycle very slowly behind me. After walking near the park area (wide space in the middle of the row of houses), I heard him cycle quickly overtaking me. As soon as he was beside me I felt him violently grab my bag from behind while cycling. He grabbed it so hard that I was propelled forward together with the bag. The bag fell on the ground and I on top of the bag. I immediately looked up and saw that the man on the bike looked back to check on me. Fortunately, he decided to cycle quickly away from me when he realized that my bag was still with me.
I was so shocked about what happened at this point. So shocked that I didnt even have the strength to shout for help even when the houses were about 10feet away from me. I grabbed my bag (now ripped in one of the handles) and checked if his companion was behind me. I was relieved to know that he was not. I used the path through the park to get back to the house. As soon as i got inside the house, I immediately talked to Jasmine about what happened. I was clearly trembling and it dawned on me that I had a lot of grazes : a scraped skin on my ring finger, right elbow, right and left knees. My flatmate, Jasmine, helped me call the police who came at the house after 30mins. He immediately took my statement. It was so difficult to be asked about details of the attack since the last thing i wanted was to get to bed. But of course I understand that they needed the details to be able to do something about it. We finished with the statement taking close to 12mn. I immediately went to bed but even though my body was so tired, I could not get myself to sleep right away.

I dont know what I would have done if the man got my bag. Coming from the Embassy to vote earlier, I had my passport inside my bag. And my trip back to the Philippines is in a week's time. It would have been a very disappointing week for me if that happened.

My memory of the UK would have been perfect if not for this incident. In my entire existence, I have never experienced such horrible incident. Not even in my country the Philippines which I think is more dangerous than the UK.

So, that's that. Now for the good news. I went to London today to cast my vote for the Philippine National Elections. It was fun voting using the machine-readable ballot sheet and the PCOS machine. Although no cameras were allowed inside the voting precinct, we were the ones to feed the ballots into the machine. I was so happy to see that the receipt correctly read my votes. The staff assisting us were kind enough to just assist us but only from 5 feet away. I thought it was just right that they should not interfere with the feeding of the ballots into the machine. The entire voting process took less than 5minutes since there were only 3 people who voted together with me. By 1pm, I was already heading to Oliver's office at Imperial College. We went around the offices in his building and then proceeded to walk to Lutong Pinoy at Earl's Court for early dinner. The Filipino buffet, at 8GBP, was worth it. I had a lot of time before my coach left and so we went around several London tourist attractions to have my photos taken on them for the last time. We used our time well as we were able to go to Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, London Eye, St Paul's Cathedral and Millenium Bridge.

Countdown : 8