Dan & Son’s Adventures

Ok, hmm…where to start.

The last week has been a blend of the most emotional, stressful and exciting times we’ve had in a long while. First the excitement of actually being in London, followed by the vague dreamlike state of jetlag, then the extremely upsetting news of the death of Dan’s older brother, followed by 2 days of job interviews. The fact that we just heard about more bombings today almost seems fitting with where our heads are at. Almost.

I’ve been meaning to get on the net and do this update for a few days now but it seems the internet cafes have had something else in mind. The hotel terminals wouldn’t let dan log into his bigpond site. The “easy” easyInternet cafe which is part of Burger King near our hotel took our £5 note and gave us a non-working credit number in return. After asking the Burger King manager who tried it and said ‘yeh it doesn’t work but it’s not part of Burger King’ we tried the phone number on the credit machine that practically said ’sorry you have been ripped off’ (the phone number wouldn’t work!). And then there’s the internet cafe that we found in the phone book and caught a bus to, only to find it lacked the ‘internet’ part of the cafe now.

So yeh, getting on the net hasn’t been the easiest experience. But i’m at a decent one now so i’ll finish that rant

We boarded our flight last Thursday afternoon after a very enjoyable stay at Allie and Bruces. We had just gotten into our seats and wondered if we might be so lucky as to have a spare seat next to us when a friendly enough guy (best described as ‘Milton’) squishes into the seat next to Dan, opens his 1.5L bottle of Diet Pepsi and proceeds to cover himself and Dan’s leg in exploding sugary liquid. ‘Only another 20hrs to go’ we were thinking to ourselves.

One of the funniest things about our flight was when Arnie was offering coffee. Well of course it wasn’t Arnie but the steward’s accent sounded exactly the same to me when he walked down the aisle saying ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ over and over again. Just imagine Arnie saying that and you’ll get what I mean

24hrs of flying later and about 4 hrs sleep (which I was happy enough to have!) we arrived in Heathrow and got through customs extremely quickly. The other day in the Australia/NZ part of the HSBC bank we found ourselves chatting with other friendly aussies who had worse stories of going through customs. So Dan and I got lucky there

Today we were just out eating lunch in South Kensington when we got an sms from Dan’s bro, Matt about there being more blasts. I suppose I should read up about the details now I’m on the net! But we called into a pub (so many nice old style ones around) and saw the news which said there was a small blast and more updates later. So we can’t get the underground back to our hotel but we’ll either bus it or walk. We’ve been doing so much walking since we were here. We both love being in London and are surprised how comfortable it feels. So many tourists here too all speaking so many languages. We’re staying right in the middle of the city craziness in Picadilly Circus. We have our hotel booked until next Monday and then we’ll probably move on to someone else. Where exactly i’m not sure but we’ll check out places like York etc on the net after I’ve finished this update.

Having the interviews at Criterion in Guildford on Monday was exhausting. Especially after the news of Dan’s brother the day before. But we wanted to get it out of the way so we knew where we stood in terms of work. We had another interview at Climax the next day (which was a lot more informal) and we got on the wrong train and ended up going express to Tonbridge in the countryside! Luckily we left 2.5hrs before our interview cos we were only 5 mins late!

Guildford is absolutely gorgeous and somewhere that Dan and I would love to live. Unfortunately we just found out that we didn’t get the work there - though the HR person really liked us. Ah well. I guess on the up side we don’t have to learn Lightwave now

We liked Guildford a lot more than Brighton. I guess cos we’ve been spoilt by the beaches back home. We’ve taken lots of touristy photos which I can’t post until I can resize the photos on my camera and upload them. But in the meantime just imagine everyone else’s photos of London tourist spots with our mugs in front

The weather since we arrived here has been amazingly good. Really warm so that we both were sunburnt on our 2nd day. But it’s the kind of weather where it’s hot in the sun and nicely cool in the shade. Perfect. Although I’m told it’s fairly rare so we’ll soak it up while we can.

I was trying to keep this shortish so it wouldn’t put people off reading it but I guess that’s quite difficult with so much happening in less than a week. To sum it all up we are feeling both emotionally and physically drained but just being here in London is too great an experience not to enjoy. We’ll be working out our next plan regarding travel and work in the next few days and see where we end up. Possibly head up to Edinburgh and then over to visit Grant in Oslo…will see what happens. We briefly caught up Ben Crowe and Jenny the other night for a drink which was really nice. And hopefully we’ll see Chris Bevan and Shane soon too. We haven’t really had a chance to contact anyone yet since being here.

I hope everyone is going well (or as well as can be expected) and we’re thinking of and missing you all. We’ll have another drink in a London pub for you if you insist. Oh you do? Well consider it done!

Son & Dan
xo

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 21st, 2005 at 10:52 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.