wednesday 28 april 2010 - auckland to london

we left for our big giant trip at 7pm. we headed to the auckland airport, had mcd’s with bryan and leilani, then hopped on the plane at 11pm. we were off!  i still couldnt believe it was happening considering i was still working at 6.59pm! haha. but the further we got into the flight, the more excited i started to get, annoying joseph every now and then by tugging on his arm saying WERE GOING ON HOLIDAY! YAY! we were on our way to london.... after an 11 hour flight, we had a three hour stop over in hong kong, we met this really cool guy from munich who is a cop there, he head just spent two months surfing in nz and loved it.
then we started the next leg to london with a 13 hour flight. so long! and i never understand why they put people who are tiny with the shortest legs on the exit rows. NOT FAIR!
we landed in heathrow, where there were 4 customs officers for a plane of 300, so it took an hour and a half to get through the line! although, Jo Currie, you’ll never guess who i saw! PAUL HENRY! i wanted to get a photo with him just for you, but you arent allowed to take photos in customs [someone else did and got yelled at!] but i did tell him that you loved his show, and that he always says what everyone else is thinking but is too scared to say and that its so funny, and he said ‘well it needs to be said” or something like that. very nice guy! apparently hes over here to cover the elections or something.
so after landing at 2.45pm, we were finally out at 5pm. we jumped on the tube with all our bags and headed to contiki headquarters and the overpriced hotel ‘the royal national’. it is a crap hole. its not worth more than $50 each, [it was $100 each]. the guys wear there maroon vests to look all fancy and then you get on the room and think they may as well just wear no uniform at all. but its a bed and it was 6pm, and our pre-leaving meeting as at 7pm in the foyer and we found out that we were leaving the next morning at 6am! paaaaah! but on the upside, my friend leanne, who lives in london, works two minutes from where we were staying, so she met us at the hotel at 6.15, and took us out for dinner to a yummy pub after the meeting, we tried all these delicious ciders and i had a beef and ale pie YUM! although i was so tired as i only slept 6 hours on the first flight, and by now it had been 40 hours since we left home, i half fell asleep reading the menu with my head in my hands. i started dreaming that movie id watched on the plane with leonardo dicaprio about the mental asylum (shutter island), and then joseph asked me ‘what are you having for dinner’ and his voice came into the dream, but i had my hands cupped over my ears so it sounded all echoey, and i was like ‘thats not what they said in the movie’ and then i woke up and realised i was still in a bar supposed to be ordering dinner, not capturing a mental asylum patient. so we had a great time with leanne, then headed off to bed at 11pm :)