London Update

Oh hey. I haven't told you yet how I'm doing in London. Let me fix that.

Things got off to a wee bit of a rocky start when my arrival was delayed, oh, about 12 hours. Thanks to some crummy weather, I missed my connection and had to spend the night in the airport. I used to think that spending the night in an airport by yourself is one of the loneliest experiences a person could have- until I spent the night alone in a bus station, which was much, much worse. Therefore, the spending the night in the airport just didn't seem so bad. Besides, there were enough people in my situation that I didn't feel so alone, yet not too many that it was noisy and crowded. Of course, I still didn't manage to get any sleep, despite the seats without armrests so I could actually lay down, but at least there was wifi so I could watch things on netflix, which made the time pass much faster. Unfortunately, Fen had to go to work instead of picking me up and spending the day with me. Sorry, Fen.

When I finally arrived in London, I was a bit nervous about customs. The visa process was extremely stressful, and I was still worried they wouldn't let me in the country despite it all. Turns out, customs was the easy part. The tricky part was dealing with my luggage.

I had managed to get all the important things in my bags, after a lot of vacuum sealing and sitting on my suitcases in order to zip them up. As soon as I arrived in baggage claim, I grabbed a luggage cart. I collected my two suitcases, both weighing in at just a smidge under the 50 pound limit. Lifting them onto the cart, however, was not as easy as it may sound. Mostly because those carts have wheels, and therefore they like to move. So whenever I would raise the bag up, it would hit the cart, because I'm not strong enough to lift a heavy bag much higher than the cart itself, and the cart would start to roll away, while I went chasing after it holding a heavy suitcase chest high. Eventually, I managed to wrangle the cart and sloppily threw my last bag on top of the others and walked through to international arrivals where Fen was waiting for me.

Then came the trials of getting all that luggage through public transport to Fen's flat. Luckily people were nice enough to offer to help us when the elevator-er, excuse me, the lift- wasn't working and we were just kind of staring at the stares wondering how on earth we were going to get all that luggage to the top. Same when we got on and off the bus, and finally, finally, we arrived at Fen's flat, where I fell into such a hard, drug-induced sleep that I actually dreamed about sleeping.

Friday night, Fen and I decided to go out for some drinks and dancing at the corner pub. I very much want to disprove the theory that British men are useless, and I really thought I was onto something after one of them came over to me and asked if he could share the chair I was sitting in. After giving him a bit of a hard time, I let him. His friend sat down next to Fen. Eventually, they figured out that it was my birthday and offered to buy the next round. We let them. When we moved from the table to the dance floor, they commented on how tall we are. Apparently, we're too tall for them, because after buying me another drink, they disappeared. I feel that this is an excellent start. We got the stubborn British boys to buy us drinks, but we didn't have to do the awkward "do you want my number"thing at the end of the evening. Then Fen pointed out that the guy who actually bought us the drinks was South African. Dammit! So close. It's a start, though. I'm convinced that not all hope is lost.

It's not, because last night I finally got to meet The White Horse! Unfortunately, I can't write up a complete review, as it was a very quick meeting, since I had to run off to another flat viewing. He did, however, proclaim the sloppy joes I made for dinner delicious and ate two of them to back that up. He's off to an excellent start, and so is London.