3/12 - Brief Report From LGW

That's London Gatwick. It's not quite 5 a.m. and most people around me seem to have spent the night here. We were lucky enough to be holed up in the Ibis Gatwick Hotel for the past 15 hours or so, of which we slept about 13. Trying to comprehend what time it is at the moment is very confusing, mostly because we've had to wake up in the dead middle of the night to get our flight to Cork. On Thai time we actually slept on a fairly normal schedule, since 3 a.m. here in Britain is 10 a.m. there, but we missed a full night before that (sleeping wasn't much of an option on Emirates, but more on them later). On top of that we left Bangkok at night and arrived in Dubai with it still dark, at around 4:30, and now we're in an airport and it's dark again, having slept through the day. I don't believe the mind was made to cope with this sort of thing....

Still, we're enjoying it in a sick sort of way. It's great to be able to say 'yeah, we've just come in from Bangkok' and other similar world-traveller statements.

Of note also: the immigration woman grilled me about my permanent resident status in the UK for five minutes, as if looking to find a hole in my story somewhere. There are actually some holes (like the fact that I don't actually live here) but it worked out, as usual.

And: our shuttle bus driver was the ultimate British stereotype. I like when a country sends me a stereotypical greeting as I arrive in it. After a failed mobile phone conversation, he turned to us and exclaimed 'Drives me bloody baaarmy, they're all foreigners, they are!'

My time is running out. 10 pence a minute is more than I'm used to!

Off to Ireland now.