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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.. :)