Got to flight fine, if somewhat rushed due to Lewis discovering that his drivers license was going to expire in July and my desire to not be the only driver for our reckless voyage. Flight was fairly uneventful, left Sydney at 4pm and arrived in London at 6:30am but in the middle had about 4 full meals so it felt a little like a constant stream of serious midnight snackery. Turbulence only really hit once, at the glorious moment of Lewis just getting his meal and scalding hot tea but before I got mine, which left me free to wait for it to go before I got mine and in the meantime mock Lewis as he desperately tried to juggle his tea around to avoid spilling it.
After getting off, finding out luggage etc (we expected weight to be an issue so didn't bring certain "luxury" items, primarily meaning I didn't bring my ugg boots... epic fail!) we met my godfather/uncle/all round legend Stephen and went back to his place in Surrey. Beautiful area, very picturesque, stereotypical English village feel. Intended to have a quiet, lazy day to beat the jetlag we then went out, bought new phones, had our very first Fosters (not as bad as I anticipated) and bought and insured a red Honda Accord, which is by far the nicest car I have so far owned. Turns out that cars here cost virtually nothing, we paid £1200 for a car worth $6000 in Aus, but the insurance is brutal, we called up a friend of Stephens who does insurance and gave him our information, 4 hours later he called back and said that he had called 60 different companies and none would insure us. We ended up paying £1800 for the insurance from a company which was, apparently, a pretty good deal, although it would have been £2400 if we had added Macky as a driver.
In the afternoon my cousin Kirsty joined us and we went to a nice Indian place for dinner, butter chicken over here is actually buttery and yellow like it is meant to be (so I'm told) rather than the tomato-y colour/taste it is in Aus.
Got to bed at 10pm, so effectively beat our jetlag on the first day through the application of a sizeable quantity of alcohol and caffeine.
Woke up at 7am feeling great, jetlag definitely done, and had a lazy morning while Lewis frantically tried to finish his work on his laptop in order to get paid and thus pay for his trip. Went in to town again for lunch and came to the realisation that English fast food is crazy. Maccas is green instead of red, Subway does nachos and donuts, everywhere sells Dr Pepper and all the fast food we have had so far is super sweet, finally an explanation for the stereotypical English teeth.
Did a bunch of shopping by myself while Lewis went back to keep working, noone in the Sainsbury's (supermarket) knew what beef jerky was and had some confusion because capsicum is called pepper here, which we forgot and made for a rather difficult conversation. Also on the list of communication muckups so far: Thong (flip flop vs g-string) and gastro (apparently here a gastro pub is a place that does really good quality food, seems like the opposite of what an Aussie would call a gastro pub). The only problem we ran into was buying an eski, they are called cooling boxes here and it took a bit of explaining to find what we wanted, and they only come in one size, additionally it's nigh on impossible to find bags of ice. Pen and Stephen (my aunt and uncle) seemed baffled by the idea of places selling big bags of ice, servos here sell firewood and beanies instead of our bags of ice and sunnies... typical.
Met up with Rose in the afternoon and went down to a "proper" pub for a beer, so far very impressed by the transition my cousins have made from when I was young and they were just cousins to now where they seem like cool people to be friends with.
Ended up having a nice walk and chat with Stephen, apparently he found my at the airport because I look just like my father did, not sure if this is a good or bad thing but at least I will soon get a glimpse of how well I will age. Then dinner and retired with Lewis to the conservatory with tea (how English of us!) where he finished off his work while I kept him company by using his phone to play Angry Birds.
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