Hello from England! Yes, we finally made it all the way through Asia and the Middle East to arrive here in the home of The Queen's English and of course, warm beer. I'm currently sitting in "EasyInternetCafe" which is the same company that runs EasyJet. It's so stupid, it's all Windows98 PCs and I'm not allowed to use my little USB Stick. Therefore, I can't actually work on my CV/Resume which is the main reason we came here in the first place. Stupid Internet cafe. I tried to log onto there support site to complain about this, but their support site gives error messages. I will ring them later and abuse them.
We're staying with Sarah's Auntie and Uncle, Andy and Maggie. They're lovely people and have kindly given us a room to stay for as long as we need, which hopefully won't be too long. We're based out in a place called Ealing, it's about 25 minutes on The Tube to get into the heart of London.
Our bags have arrived from New Zealand though they're still sitting in a warehouse somewhere waiting to be delievered to us. We should have them by the end of the week, which'll mean I'll have some nice shiny clothes to rock up to job interviews in.
It's our second day full day here today, we arrived on Saturday night after a flight that didn't go so well. As we were boarding in Turkey a man sort of pushed past us saying "I'm very sorry my wife is very sick", I didn't really think much more of it until the Captain asked during the flight if we had any Doctors or Nurses on board. 5 minutes after that annoncement we got told that we could no longer use the rear aircraft toilets, 5 minutes after that annocement we were told that we'd be making an emergency stop in Hungry somewhere (Bucarest? Budapest? Not sure) to offload her. I felt a little sorry for her, but at the same time who gets on a plane and tries to fly for 4 hours when they're as sick looking as she was? It's my guess they were trying to get to London to seek out medical help there, but I have no real idea.
So we landed and offloaded her, then we had to wait around for another hour while they refuelled the plane and stuffed around with traffic control and some other airplane mumbo jumbo. We finally made it to Luton airport 2 hours after we were meant to, so that we could stand in a customs queue for about another hour and a half. Sarah found out as we got to the customs counter that her "Right of Abode" entitles her to go in the speedy "EU Residents" line, but that wouldn't really have helped too much because she'd still have to wait for me.
We were lucky enough to get a lift to Andy and Maggie's, instead of taking 2 trains and 3 tubes as we thought we were going to have to. One of the girls from the Oasis trip was on the same flight as us and her friend dropped us off along the way. We were treated to a lovely meal of Chicken, Pork along with all sorts of other tasty things, Andy used to be a professional chef!
Yesterday we headed into town on The Tube for the first time, we had Mattie (One of Andy and Maggie's daughters) to help us navigate. It's really easy though, it'd be impossible to get lost. Sarah did a bit of shopping but even though it was Sunday the amount of people out shopping was just insane. The fact it was the Tour De France and a few other big things had been on meant there were a lot of people from out of town, but Sarah said the queues even to get into a changeroom were so huge it wasn't worth waiting. I hope that's just a one off, but I doubt that it is.
We headed back into town today, just ourselves this time. We've now opened our HSBC accounts properly, we have EFTPOS cards we can use and online banking and all those good things you need!
That's about all, I'm posting this 24 hours late because we left the stupid cafe in a hurry.
Tim
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