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Saturday, January 29, 2011

"This is a Piccadilly Line service to Cockfosters." Oh dear.

9:51 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)

Last night we said goodbye to Dion and Patrick with the first program dinner since everyone else went home in early December. We were all there (save Tristan, who had already left on a trip), including Niki, Heni, and Zoli. It was really great seeing them again after such a long absence. Hopefully we'll get to see them once more before the last five of us leave next Saturday!

And now... I'm in London! It certainly took long enough.

I frantically tried to pull everything and myself together this morning after a sleepless night. I left on time, but there's something going on at the Kőbánya-Kispest metro station, so a slightly different route was necessary. Once I got to the airport, I quickly went through security (but had to get a patdown for some inexplicable reason) and sat at my gate. The flight to Amsterdam was good; I kept falling asleep and waking up again a few minutes later. The sandwiches they gave us were really good... I'm having a rough time deciding if I like KLM's or Lufthansa's better, haha.

I raced through the Amsterdam airport to get to my gate for London, but it was closed when I got there. I hung around for a while and when it opened, we had to go through a mini security checkpoint. The lady at the x-ray machine couldn't figure out what was in my bag, so the other lady went rifling through it till they realised that what they didn't recognise was a bar of chocolate. They had a good chortle over it, then sent me on my merry way. The people sitting next to me on the flight were from New Zealand. I've never met Kiwis before! They were really nice and fun to talk to; I think the guy was a little tipsy, though... one too many in-flight beers, methinks.

When we landed in London, I had forgotten that I'd have to go through customs and border control. IT TOOK FOREVER. I got through a few chapters in my book, though, so I guess that's an upside to waiting in a line for an hour and a half. Once through, I got some money (I cried a bit on the inside about the exchange rate) and bought a tube ticket. I didn't get lost! Wahoo!! I made it to the hostel (The Walrus Waterloo) easily enough, and now I'm hanging around in my room of 15 other people, trying to stay awake after a very long day.

I've got to finish some paper-writing tomorrow, but hopefully I will be out and about by the afternoon. I definitely need to rest now, though; I don't think I truly recovered from Poland. Or Greece, for that matter...

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