Beth's Oz Adventure

My time in Malaysia ended on Saturday as I was London bound for surprise xmas visit. I had been hearing reports of Heathrow chaos and already convinced myself I would be spending xmas at the airport but to my relief there were no reported delays. Anticipating a full to bursting plane had already secured myself an exit row seat (extra leg room) but was not necessary as plane half empty so had pick of the rows! So I settled in and initiated my jet lag prevention strategy & attempted to sleep until morning broke in the UK. After semi dozing for a few hours I awoke & discovered we were 30000 feet above India & got a good view as no clouds, was mostly brown and rugged looking and then turned into the snow covered peaks of Pakistan, then Afghanistan, various middle eastern countries, & green patchwork like fields of Russia and Ukraine. After this the cloud cover thickened and the view of the ground below was lost, but was still bright sunshine above the clouds, which continued all the way over Europe and we began our descent to London. As we got closer to the top of the clouds there was still no view of the ground and as we entered them I felt a mixture of fear (how can the pilots see where they’re going ???!!) and complete admiration at the wonders of the technology that was guiding our descent. Inside the clouds there was still no sign of the ground below then after a couple of minutes we emerged and I caught my first glimpse of UK soil – the M25, which for the first time in my life I was happy to see!

Landed smoothly and was informed it was 5c outside. After my time in Oz my warmest item of clothing was a thin fleece so consequently prepared myself for the UK winter by departing the plane wearing pretty much every top in my possession and my only remaining pair of trousers – a pair of ill fitting jeans that were an emergency purchase after my only other pair died in Oz. I teamed up this bizarre attire with my now paint splattered sandals (I no longer owned any shoes) and my 2 remaining (odd) socks that both had holes in. So you will imagine my surprise when I was greeted not by the fashion editor of Vogue but by the fashion police who promptly arrested me for multiple offences. Luckily they let me off with just a caution this time and I was released. 2 tubes, 3 trains and a taxi later I finally arrived home in Shrewsbury 21 hours after leaving Kuala Lumpur.

My mission for the next morning was to unpack and sort out my stuff. The actual course of events was: 9am, switched on the tv and marvelled at the bbc and people talking in English accents, looked at my bag then flicked over to popworld and marvelled again at hearing NEW music – since 1st Feb my entire musical world had consisted of the 488 songs on my Ipod. 10:30am, went to my bag, opened it and spread the entire contents over the floor then got strangely mesmerised by Hollyoaks and any illusions of maintaining my TV free life slowly evaporated. Midday, moved the contents of my bag from the middle of the floor to small piles around the edge of the room, where they still remain.

In the afternoon I braved the winter and went out to purchase my new bible ‘south east asia on a shoestring’ and became disproportionately excited at visiting such establishments as Boots, Superdrug, Woolies and M&S. And then a productive evening catching up on all the important events happening in Corrie.

So now am fully ensconced in UK Xmas life, watching too much tv, eating too much etc, etc & planning underway for departure back to SE Asia – I leave 16 Jan headed to Bangkok. So until then happy new year and blog will continue late Jan 2007!