After months of counting down, I’ve finally made it to London! And at the risk of scaring my friends and family back home… My first reaction when I saw London was that I wish I could transfer my offer here and live here for awhile! We’ll see how I feel at the end of four months! 😉
I left my mom’s house in Clackamas around 9am yesterday, flew out of PDX at 11:30, landed in Oakland for a brief layover, then flew out of there at 2pm for Los Angeles, arrived at LAX at about 3:30, loaded up a luggage cart and walked all of my stuff from terminal one down to the international terminal and hung out there for 5 hours until my 9:15pm flight to London.
I was a little disappointed when I boarded and realized the promised “power plug” at my seat was British power and I had no adapter. The power plug was really a big selling point for me. However, it ultimately didn’t matter because I was only awake long enough to chat with the guy next to me, eat dinner (salmon, pasta, asparagus…. starter salad….dessert… hellloooooo business class! woohoo!). I had also been disappointed that difficulties logging in the night before prevented me from getting a bulkhead seat, but that ended up working out for the best too- I could completely stretch my legs out under the seat in front of me, but had I been in bulkhead I wouldn’t have been able to do that. Since my left knee has been giving me problems lately, being able to stretch it out completely is very important.
Anyway, so I had dinner, and then I did something which in hindsight was incredibly stupid–the guy next to me (a married man who looked to be in his early to mid-forties) was taking ambien to help him sleep and he offered me one (episodes of CSI finding random dead girl in airplane galley anyone?). Of course, the imaginary CSI episodes didn’t begin popping into my head until I’d already swallowed the pill. I usually can’t sleep at all in anything moving, so I really appreciated that I fell asleep so quickly and slept for close to 6 hours. I woke up feeling refreshed and happy, and excited that my 10 hour flight was suddenly only 2 hours and 30 minutes. Woo!  However… about an hour later I started feeling really sick and the last hour or so of the flight was me trying desperately not to puke everywhere. And navigating Heathrow with all my luggage and all the turns and escalators was NOT FUN. So, my lessons learned are (1) don’t take pills from strangers, and (2) don’t take ambien on airplanes! Apparently you are not supposed to take those when flying? Ooops! I have been sick all afternoon as a result. It’s 2pm Pacific Time right now, but it’s 10pm here.
I am extremely exhausted, and the Looneys and I are going flat-hunting tomorrow so I am going to go get some sleep. Once I actually have a place to live I’ll commence with the picture posting! 🙂
The Daily Chelle 