Welcome to the UK

Well we've finally got around to creating our blog site, yay.

Anna and I have made it to the UK. We left Adelaide on Sunday the 25th November at 1pm. The first leg of our journey was a 7 hour flight to Singapore Airport. It didn't seem too bad, and Anna did quite well considering her fear of flying. We had 5 hours to kill at the airport before we took off for Heathrow Airport out of London. We mixed it up quite a bit – sat in a massage chair, did some shopping, had dinner, watched a movie, played some computer games. There's actually quite a bit to do for free there. Good!

With the help of some sleeping tablets we managed to sleep for about 7 hours out of the 14 hour flight to the UK, but it still seemed to take for ever. We were flying back in time and it was a flight of darkness the whole way. We arrived at Heathrow around 5:30am and it was freezing, especially since we'd left Adelaide with near 30ºC temperatures. Jumped onto a Hotel Hoppa bus (for £4) to the Novotel where were spent the day chilling and getting used to the fact that we were in the UK. The morning seemed to take forever... 10am felt like the end of the day! The hotels in Heathrow are very isolated, so we didn't have much to do. Anna and I decided to take a walk and do some exploring around the area. It was basically a residential area, but we found a community internet/café tucked away in the back streets for some cheap lunch (£2 for a BLT). The whole experience of being over here in the UK was still feeling so surreal – the combination of jet lag and lack of quality horizontal sleep was taking its toll.

We checked out from the hotel at around 3.00pm when my mate Andrew from Australia came and collected us on his way back from work at Heathrow. We drove along several motorways heading south to where Andrew and his girlfriend Anita live, to Crawley, West Sussex, about 30 mins train ride south of London. It was getting dark already and it was only 3.30pm! This will take some getting used to. Back at their flat we had some drinks and dinner and called it a night about 9pm. Our body clocks were all over the shop and we were knackered. (Over to Anna…)

The next couple of days we spent organising ourselves by shopping in the local CountyMall, and looking for places to live in London on the Gumtree website. We have been acclimatising to the weather quite well and the sun even came out today! The English architecture and the little squirrels have been keeping us in awe of this country. Surprisingly, the local supermarket, Tesco, stocks cheap alcohol including great bargains. Matt bought a 12 pack of Grolsch for £7.49!