Friday, 3 August 2012

Flying and shit

So this is my first post from the other side of the world. I can happily report that the flights all went well and none of my planes crashed at all. Close to 30 hours of travelling was pretty interesting. I watched a few movies, listened to some music and did some sleeping. I spent a substantial amount of time trying to optimise my sleeping times on the plane to reduce the impact of jet-lag. I arrived at Heathrow at around midday and Hayden came to meet me at the airport. I had a few problems with a grumpy customs officer as I had no idea of where I was going to stay and I didn't even have Haydens phone number. The officer said "what would you say if I came in to New Zealand without knowing where I was going to stay on the first night?" I felt like saying "I don't know, I'm not a customs officer" but I wanted to avoid the rubber glove treatment if possible. He asked me a whole heap of questions about how much money I had and wrote down my flight numbers out of London. I then also looked like an idiot when I walked out through the one-way doors from the (ridiculously tiny) duty free store. I managed to talk my way back in to get some bottles of booze for Cornwall.

We took the underground going to Cockfosters. It turns out that hearing an automated voice say "Cockfosters" never gets old. We disembarked the train at Victoria station and walked to the Giraffe bar/restaurant where Hayden works. We had some beers and ate some tucker while we watched NZ win gold medals in the the rowing. We then adorned ourselves with all blacks flags and went to check out some touristy stuff like Big Ben, London Eye, Westminster abbey, Trefalgar square, Lions etc. I was a little surprised to find that London wasn't quite as different as I was expecting, I'm not sure what I expected though! Apparently there was unusually few people around and all of the big sights seemed familiar after seeing them so many times in pictures.

Finally we took another underground train to Seven Sisters where Hayden lives. We walked past about a million chicken fast food shops to get to his flat and after ditching my bag we went to get supplies for a nacho dinner. I promised Hayden I would make a comment that he thinks Nachos are improved substantially by adding spinach to the mixture. While I don't disagree with him, I don't know if you are supposed to just chuck random vegetables in to stuff, but what the hell would I know about cooking anyway?! Either way we had a quick argument about it anyway.
I am extremely tired right now but I am pretty determined to beat this jetlag thing. My body thinks it is 10am (it is actually 11pm) and I haven't had any sleep for about 24 hours so hopefully that has not impeded my writing skills too much. If this is just a load of codswallop then I may re-write some bits but right now I am going to go pack for Cornwall. I'm not sure how that will go in my current state.

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