London Airport

And you thought you were rid of me! Muahahahaaa!

Jess is back. That is, I'm away, which means I have a reason to post here again. I'm writing this post ahead of time, sitting around waiting in the London international airport. The internet here is not free, so I'll have to wait for free wireless to be able to post anything online. A word processor will have to do for now.

So far, it's been quite the adventure, or ordeal, depending on how you want to look at it. We've probably had a total of one hour of sleep plus four hours of dozing off. Right now, my cousin Shelly is curled up on a seat with her head on her backpack not sleeping some more. I decided to write. First, we waited four hours for our flight out of Chicago, after a two hour bus ride from Madison. Then, we waited another two for a seven hour flight. That was ridiculous. The nice thing was we got to watch tv shows and movies for free, and we were served dinner (which I didn't take because I wasn't hungry - we'd already eaten). The downside was it was a seven hour flight, on which it was impossible to sleep, and we became super-dehydrated.

We made it to London, and exchanged our currency. Apparently, the dollar sucks more than I thought it did, which makes the Euro be higher than I thought it was, which is bad news for the wallet...but we'll manage, I am sure. In case you're curious, $400 = 225 euro after deducting the fees for doing the conversion. After that, it took an hour to get through customs because where we were supposed to go was unclear at first. The guy at immigration was nice and said that if we left through his gate we were going to the city of London, but what we really wanted was the gate on the other side of the room separated by glass to get to other international terminals. So when we got THERE, the lady was...really impatient and snippy. So that wasn't fun. She wanted to know everything in the world, I swear. I was waiting for her to ask how many pets I had and what their names were and how long I was going to be wearing my bra for. Finally she stamped our passports and we got through there, and then the next gate did some weird bio check on us...not sure what that was...at all...she took a picture? Maybe it's one of those new fangled full body scanners. Anyway, they were nice, so we got through there with a sticker thing on our passport and went through security. The thinger beeped when I went through, and I'm not entirely sure why unless some accessory I was carrying set it off, so the security guard felt me up very thoroughly and then let me through. Then we unruffled our feathers (aka I got my shoes back on properly and figured out what to do with my bags) and went to get our boarding passes. When we got to Aer Lingus, she was like, “Surprise, we don't have a ticket number for you, and I don't know what the heck is going on with this darn technology!” It was all very confusing but basically got down to the fact that, since Expedia didn't let us book our seats on a foreign airline, we didn't get any technical tickets, even though we had obviously bought them. Anyway, we were five hours early, so that wasn't a problem. It's not like we were in a rush or anything. She wrote them up herself on the computer and printed them out. Then we went to the bathroom in a very remote place where you had to walk into the wall, turn left, turn right, turn left, and turn right again. (Bathrooms here are labelled, “Male/Female Toilet.” Much more straight and to the point.) Then we walked around. This airport is exactly like a mall, except with flight information on TV screens and large seated areas in the middle area between the Chocolate Box and Timberland. (And Fat Face. And FCUK. Yes, it's FCUK. French Connection UK. Duh. What did you think it was?) Then we ate at Giraffe, and since it's really great airport food, it cost us about $50 overall (so $25 each, and that's including the tip). And that was the most affordable place we could find that wasn't fast food. At least the food was really really awesome. I had fish and chips and a smoothie. REAL fish and chips. I'm going to make it for you guys when I get home, now that I know what it's really supposed to be. The restaurants in America don't do it right! Shelly had a salad and the same smoothie. We got to keep the little giraffes they put in your smoothie glass. Mine is yellow, and Shelly's is blue. I'm bringing it home as a reminder of the only meal I ate in London.

And now we're sitting/laying here, because for some dumb reason, our gate doesn't open until 45 minutes before our flight takes off. It's 1:10 right now, and the gate opens at 2:30, and our flight to Shannon, which has not (yet) been cancelled like the one to Dublin was, leaves at 3:15. Let me tell you, we got a liiiittle nervous when we saw that the flight to Dublin was cancelled. But Shannon isn't. The weather must be better there right now, luckily for us.

It is fabled that we will have to provide our fingerprints later, but that's only if I'm reading the babble on the screens correctly. I guess we'll see. It's possible that after today my fingerprint will be circulating out there in the world of fingerprints. Spooky?

Either way, we're going to get on the airplane. Once we get to Shannon, we will find some form of transportation to Limerick, where we will stay for the night. Tomorrow, we travel to Dublin. Perhaps tonight I'll get wi-fi in the hotel. If so, chat later. If not, chat even more later. Either way, I'll try to make some phone calls once I hit Ireland.

I'm sooooo exhausted. Over and out.