sammi needham : cogitate

Just a quickie, as there isn’t much time for writing with all the activities ahead, but i’ve finally set up a flickr account that i will hopefully be able to update now and then that should give a better idea of what’s going on than some dumb ramblings.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sammi77/

Friday: Got out of work a bit later than i wanted to, feeling pretty unorganised, but still reasonably relaxed. Dropped into NextByte to pick up some new headphones for the trip and Steph had left me a little gift. Thanks Steph. Went home, packed the last couple of things and headed to the airport. Went through the big doors at Melbourne airport at about 9pm expecting a world of fun and wonderment to greet me on the other side. Alas, it seems that Australian customs employees hate their jobs and haven’t cracked a smile for the last 4-5 years. Their faces were permanently on ‘mundane’. But the queue’s were short and then it was on to grab something to eat and duty-free shopping. Again, i was a little surprised at just how empty the international departure lounges were, a sprinkling of shops that were all just carbon copies of each other, filled with 2litre booze bottles and bored employees, and only one place to get a drink. So that’s where i headed to grab a drink. Then just waited it out for the plane, reading the manual of my new k10d. Jumped on a plane at about 10:50pm and took the 9 or so hour flight to Hong Kong airport.

I never eat plane food, but seeing as it was my first international trip, i figured i’d give anything a go. I didn’t need to, it was the same gloop – there was just way more of it. I’m pretty good at sleepingon planes, i’m usually asleep before we actually take flight, and this was no exception, about the only time that i woke up on the way to Hong Kong was for meals and beer. Which was fine, although i swear i ate about 8 meals on the trip to London. I think everytime we flew through a timezone they figured someone was eating somewhere and prepared a new meal for us. It was all fine until Roxy started to get a bit crampy in the stomach, turns out i think she had swalloed some ‘bad’ chicken, not “bad chicken” as in evil-cape-wearing-nemesis-of-the-earth chicken, but the sort of bad chicken that ruins the start of your big holiday. Roxy was pretty sick from the way to Hong Kong to London, especially as we approached Heathrow. There were a few heated moments, jumping seats and nervously waiting in toilet queues to make a mess.

We taxi’d from the plane to the airport on a squishy bus and waited about 45 mins for our luggage. Then grabbed some pounds from a hole in the wall and caught the tube to someplace in England, then some other place in England, then got on a double decker bus to some place in England’s east end where Dan was waiting with open arms to walk us to his place. Roxy was still pretty shady and had to stop off on the walk to aquaint herself with a back alley. I held her hair back.
Roxy showered at Dan’s as i went for a walk and got some booze and food for our afternoon barby in the park. We returned home, got some food together and pumped up the footy, then travelled over to the park to show those round ball kids what a real footy looked like. We took a few pot shots at squirrels with the footy and jumped around like aussies for a while until Baz arrived. He was sporting a shiny new bike and his hair was very long. I took some photos of him like some sort of gay lover and then it was time to go home. It doesn’t start getting dark here at the moment until about 10pm, it’s awesome. That night we went to the pub.
That’s all there’s time for now, Roxy is off to Birmingham tomorrow to visit friends, and i’ve just booked a flight over to Amsterdam for Tuesday night to visit Loeve.
Hammer just got back from Armenia, or somewhere like that and we will be catching up tonight back at Dan’s (Monday). Hung out with The Caz last night in the west end. It’s different over here. And everyone has pommy accents!
xx

sammi