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Hello from England :)

I arrived yesterday at midday after around 26 hours of air travel. The day before I had spent in Sydney, catching up with my friend Jon. We walked around in the city center and had lunch, saw a few of the sights, etc. The flight to Sydney was really nice because I had been moved up to Business class due to overbooking in Economy class. In the comfort of spacious, computer-controlled, back-massaging seats one is provided with heated towels and a cool refreshing drink on boarding the flight. During the flight you are served a full 3 course meal as well as alcoholic beverages (as many as you care to ask for).. what a shame it was for the shortest leg in the journey.. still, very comfortable. I could see into the first class seating which basically gives each passenger their own separate room with a closing door, reasonably large comfortable seat/bed, and a table with large screen TV and a bouquet of flowers... how nice.

The flight from Sydney went via Bangkok to Dubai, and was entirely in the dark since we were following night time around the globe. I seem to be reasonably good at sitting around doing nothing for long periods of time so long-distance air travel didn't seem too bad. I watched a few movies and TV shows on the in-flight entertainment system but most of the time I was watching the little airplane moving across the map and keeping track of what the current local time was and what countries we were flying over.. Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, Oman, UAE, Iran, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Holland, England. The brief stop in Dubai was very interesting - the airport is massive. When a plane lands it several airport buses pull up beside it and all the passengers pile on to those and are taken to the airport terminal (about 5-10 minutes drive), across various runways and passing close to the jumbo jets taxiing around. The terminal itself is also enormous -- a huge tubular structure 4 or 5 storeys high with large decorative designs all over the interior and rows of (fake) trees and gardens lining the departure lounge and various gates. There was a haze of thin cloud over the desert that morning and looking into the distance you could see various clusters of skyscrapers, cranes, oil tanks.

Over Europe I could watch the ground below using the plane's cameras (since by then it was daylight), and whenever the plane landed I could watch out of the front camera to see the runway line up infront of the plane and come closer and closer. I didn't get too much sleep so was pretty tired when I finally got to Daniel and Jenny's house in Cranleigh, Surrey. I felt pretty manky after not changing clothes and being at times rather hot and sweaty for about 30 hours or so.. getting into the shower, relaxing and changing clothes was a great relief.

I had a walk around Cranleigh in the afternoon, but was pretty much tired so went to bed around 5pm or so and slept for the night.

Today was interesting.. I woke quite early and headed into London with Nic, Daniel and Jenny and their friend from Germany (Flow? possibly spelled differently but pronounced that way). We parked in the suburbs somewhere and then caught a tube into the city. The center of London feels very.. different from other cities I've been in. There are very few tall buildings.. most are maybe 5-6 storeys high but are bold and distinctive looking and stretch wide across entire city blocks, following around the curves in the roads. From where I disembarked the subway and came up on to the street I was surrounded with these buildings in all directions with roads and alley ways disappearing off in all directions. We had lunch in a pub, with warm ale. I activated my bank account, and I have a debit and credit card now. We then walked down to the thames and we were going to go up the Eye of London (the huge ferris wheel thing) so we could see the view but we had to leave to see Flow off at the train station so instead we went to a few book shops and then to Liverpool street station.

Pics so far are on my Flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/7525309@N04/

I'm currently quite tired as I don't think my sleeping pattern is in sync with the timezone here just yet... So thats all I can manage to write for now.. :)

And tomorrow is the day.

I am sitting in my room with my bags packed, going over in my head to find the things I've forgotten. I'm sure there are several, and I'll realise what they are when I'm in the plane somewhere over the Tasman sea. I feel somewhat excited, but I'm not entirely sure what else I feel. I think it will feel a bit sad to be leaving New Zealand behind.

I have music playing on my stereo, which I can't bring with me.. A surprisingly small amount of stuff fits into even quite a big suitcase, especially when you're trying to stick to a 23kg weight limit. I also can't fit my cow or my elephant. But the wall-frog is already packed :)

Tomorrow at 1:15pm I fly to Christchurch, and then on to Sydney at 6:05pm, arriving at 7:25pm Australian time. Then I will stay a night at Formule 1 Hotel Sydney Airport.. which looks fairly modest, hopefully it'll be alright. Sunday will be spent either at Sydney airport, or if I feel up to it I might go visit my cousin at Bondai Beach. The 16 hour 50 minute flight to Dubai leaves at 6:45pm and arrives at 5:35am Dubai time. Unfortunately there is only a 2 hour stop in Dubai as I'd have liked to have spent a bit more time there. But these tickets were part of some kind of deal meaning stopover options were limited, but the flights to UK were pretty cheap ($1300 inc taxes). Anyways, at 8:05am, this is on Monday, I'll board a flight to London's Gatwick airport which arrives at 12:30 pm. And that'll be that. Friends of mine from Dunedin will be (hopefully) waiting at the airport to pick me up and take me to Cranleigh, which is about an hour or so southwest of London.

From there I don't have too much in the way of further plans other than that at some point in the coming 2 weeks I need to go in to London and find a flat to live in. And also buy some new clothes.

I often have emotions that are associated with a certain time or place.. not really any emotion that I can name. Each time one of these links forms in my mind it is brand new -- I've never felt that way before. Its a place, the feel of it, the smells and sounds and colours and experience of it. Often I will have these emotions associated with the music that I was listening to at the time. I was in the supermarket the other day and Orinocho Flow started playing and in my mind I had the feeling of camping at Tologa Bay on the East Cape of the North Island with my family about age 7 or 8. They're not really feelings that I was experiencing at the time, I think the feeling is the actual memory of the place.. so much more than can be put into words its like I go back there in my mind and experience it again it some way. I guess I feel like I'm gonna look back at where I am right now with certain feelings but at the moment I just can't tell what that feels like.. But I know I'll feel like this was a significant time in my life. Its sortof a transition from the familiar, the comfortable, known, etc, into the unknown. I honestly have no idea what I'll be doing in 1 week from now. What will England be like for me?

Leaving on Saturday..

Got back yesterday from a trip to Kaiteretere. I drove up on friday with my parents and sister for my grandmother's 80th birthday celebrations. The weather was great, and there was lots of food and drinking. Everyone had some advice for Europe.. quite a few cousins, uncles, etc have spent time in the UK, and my Uncle has a nice place in Norwich where I can stay for a while if I like. Sounds pretty good.

I took some photos of the view where I was staying:






So if they came out okay thats good -- I can use Flickr to show pics here, so I'll post more when I get to some interesting places and take pics to show :)

Well today was a good one -- after sleeping in until a healthy 11am or so, I got up and went to a job interview over in Mornington. The interview was for a programming position that I had been referred to by a friend of mine. The business is run out of the guy's house, where he lives and works with his wife -- well I think she's his wife. They were both present for the interview, as was their small child who watched my closely throughout the 20 or so minutes we were discussing things.. I think I must have made a good impression, coz then I was offered full time work. That's pretty much the best interview I've done I have to say -- one interview and they're writing me a contract and taking down my bank account details.

The job sounds pretty cool, I'll be working on a web interface for a system that allows athletes to share and comment on training videos of themselves or others. Or if not that then one of several other projects that they have going at the moment. I'll have to get up to speed on it pretty quickly -- hopefully it won't be too difficult. The brilliant part is that I can work from home and I can do the hours at any time of day or night as long as they get done.

I then went to the bank to sort out a few things and walked back up home again to think about the new job and do a bit of reading.

I walked down to McDonalds to work my shift. They've just changed to a new way of preparing their food, so when I got there some of the equipment had changed and organisation of the kitchen was all different from before. This was only my third shift there so everything is still new enough to be interesting and the time I spend there is more or less totally busy. After 5 hours, plus all that walking around today my legs were pretty tired. How sore are they going to be after 9 hours? The other McD's crew are pretty cool, nobody seemed to care too much if I got something wrong, which is okay. I'm still learning how to do most of the stuff, and a couple of times I got the wrong sauce on the bun, or something like that -- it just gets binned and they start it again. It only happened a few times though and yeah, pretty relaxed and, well, fun, as crazy as that sounds. More fun than my old IT job was :)

They've rostered me on for like 40 hours or something next week, and I've signed on for 40 hours at the new job too. Worse, the McDonalds hours are graveyard shifts, since they're going 24/7 from the first of feb. I'm not sure how to fit it all in. I'm going to have to work, say, 8 hours of this programming job followed by a midnight to 7am shift at McDonalds, followed by sleep, followed by another 8 or whatever I can manage to fit in of the programming work.. Fortunately it'll only be like that for a week before I can tell McD's to give me less work again. Or I could just quit McDonalds... But honestly, I kinda like it there, and I'd rather see if I can stay there if I possibly can... :)

I walked back up the hill to my parents house in the rain. They'd left me some roast chicken, as well as kickass icecream and fruit salad. So now I'm sitting in my comfy room with the heater on (yeah, dunedin is cold in summer).. and full of good food, pretty tired, but relaxed and comfortable... so I'm happy.

I don't want to write anything.