"We Just Touched Down in London Town"

Hello All!

I've decided to blog about my experiences!  I know you're thinking "Oo, how exciting, another travel blog..."  Well, Hush!  This blog is mostly a spot to post pictures and allow people (read: my parents) to rightclick and save whatever fun stuff I put up.  Also,  if you've found this site, you probably know me, and you know how much I LOVE to talk about myself, err, i mean, my travels :-p  So please, enjoy, steal my pictures, leave comments, whatever your heart desires!


So let's get this party started!

That's me after my ridiculous day of travel from JFK to Heathrow.  Here's what happened:  I woke up Thursday Morning bright and early to finish packing/ make sure my life was in order.  After packing, unpacking, and repacking my bags 2x (don't ask why)  I was finally ready to leave the house.  One last thing to do - online check-in to pay for my bags.  However, Virgin Atlantic's website wasn't allowing me to online check-in and was informing me that I should check in at the airport.  Unfortunately, that would mean paying double the price for my checked baggage... um no thanks!  I was already planning on paying $160 for luggage, and now it looks like I'll have to pay about $210!  So I called the airline and the woman on the phone was nice enough to work with me and let me pay the reduced fee over the phone.  Phew!  We were FINALLY ready to leave, albeit an hour later than my mother would have liked, but we were still going to be on time.  We arrived at JFK at 4:45ish, where I printed my boarding pass at the little kiosk thing.  I always get confused as to the order of all this stuff (alas, I'm not quite as jet-setter-y as I'd like) so luckily one of the Virgin Atlantic ladies came over to help me.  here's how that went down-

Last precious moments with my phone

me - "Hi, I printed my boarding pass, now what do I do?"
VAL - "Well, you're flight is at 1:30"
me - "No...I'm on the 7:30 flight to Heathrow
VAL - "Yes.. unfortunately that flight is not leaving until 1:30..."
me - "wait, 1:30 in the morning?!
VAL - "Yes.  If you'd like, you can try to get a seat on the American Airlines flight into Heathrow that leaves at 9:40 from a different terminal.  There are about 25 seats left."

Yeah, that was a fun thing to hear.  Long story short (too late, I know)  I decided that I would stick with my flight, even though it wouldnt leave until 1:30, because a)  I hired a taxi to pick me up from Heathrow and they know my flight number and terminal, and b) I just spent all that

clearly my mom had nothing better to do while I was talking

 time and money making sure my 3 bags would get on the right flight to the UK.  So I decided to bum around the airport with my mom for a while to kill some time.  The VAL was very nice and commended me on my good attitude about the whole thing.  I could tell that people had been freaking out about this to them for the entire day.  So in the terminal I ate a nice dinner with my mom, exchanged some dollars for pounds, made last minute calls to my dad and sister, and got a lot of reading done.  Unfortunately my flight didn't actually take off until 2:45AM and I didn't arrive in the UK until about 3 in the afternoon on Friday.  Apparently, the delay occurred because our plane was having some mechanical problems on Tuesday or Wednesday in Johannesburg, South Africa, and another plane wasn't available until 1:30am on Friday.  In addition, the new plane was a smaller model, so they had to take time rearranging the seats

on the flight.  This sucked because I always like to sit in a window seat no matter what and I ended up sitting in an aisle seat directly next to the toilets (yuck!)  However, I totally lucked out because the middle row is 4 seats across, and there were only 2 of us sitting in the row. So sneaky (and selfish and still incredibly sick - oh by the way, did I mention I've had the most ridiculous cold for the past... week!? yeah, try traveling to a foreign country when you feel like hell!) me spread out across 3 seats and got to sleep HORIZONTALLY for most of the flight!  I actually slept, it was glorious!  Didn't get to eat anything, but whatever, it was totally necessary.  Luckily my row-partner was very good natured about the whole thing and let me sleep in peace.  I hope I didn't snore or drool on him or anything....   So I finally arrived to Heathrow and my taxi driver was waiting with a sign for me! (too bad I was too tired, smelly, and disoriented to take a picture, damn damn damn!)  His name was Magit and he was very friendly and helpful, and very funny.

As he was loading my luggage into the "boot" of the car, I walked over to hop into the passenger seat on the right side... until I opened the door and found the steering wheel!  Magit said "you can drive, if you'd like" and I bashful walked to the other side and climbed in the actual passenger seat.

  We talked all about schooling in the UK vs. the US, and what Guildford is like.  It was very nice to have someone to talk to after such a long time in the passport scanning line.


So I checked into my room at the YMCA on Bridge street, had a shower, ate some dinner, check in with people on the internet and went to bed! And thus concludes my first post about my first day on the other side of the pond!  Thanks for reading, more to come tomorrow!

~ Sie