AAA, Part 3: The flight + 1st day

I forgot to mention in my previous post about the airflight baggage regulations. I pretty much stuffed everything into my main luggage coz I couldn't be bothered with any hand luggage issues. Ronnie however, decided to take his bag in as hand luggage. As a result, at the check-in, he had to reveal its entire contents to the counter-girl. Yeap, he was a bit embarassed, but hey, no pain no gain!

Anyway, 13hrs sitting on a flight is no joke, but fortunately there was a slew of movies for us to watch, especially good for me as I don’t sleep very well on planes. There was one questionable selection though, Hawa pointed out to me, as they were showing The Terminal as well. If you’ve watched that before, you’d know it’s not something you’d want to watch on an airplane to LONDON at this point in time! I did feel bad for Hawa though, her lengthy frame just did not fit the seats, making it a bit hard for her to get comfortable.

The flight wasn't very comfortable either, with quite a bit of turbulence. Hawa, who wasn't happy with the pilots, got their names down so that she'd know if she was flying with them again. Ronnie, on the other hand, was busy picking up one of the stewardesses, apparently doing well! The meals, although nothing special, were okay though.

We arrived safely early evening. We had the typical "which line do we go to?" immigration problem. Then Hafiz made an infamous comment, "Kita ni kat Heathrow ke Hydarabad???" (Are we in Heathrow or Hydrarabad?) We asked him why, and he said, take a look at the immigration counters. It appeared that all, yes ALL, the personnel manning the counters appeared to be of Indian descent!!!

Anyway, we made our way past the immigration without much problems, although she did ask us extensively about what we were doing here. We found our contact, and headed off to the parking lot for our taxivan. The weather felt like Genting!

Our hotel was the Kensington International, where the rooms were small, but golly gosh cozy. I did a bit of early exploring of the environs with Hafiz, and typically I ended up with chocolates (ha ha!) + Walker's Crisps. I bought a choc bar called YORKE, which had the tagline "NOT FOR GIRLS". I assume it was due to the heavy choc content, hey if I, of all people, can't finish a choc bar, I'd say it's an achievement for them choc-makers...

Then it was a bed flop, tv switch as we waited for dinner. Soon Hawa gave us a ring, and surprisingly she was alone. Turns out Ronnie went off with his stewardess (!)(Tracy, btw) and just passed her dough for dinner. We ended up exploring some more, looked for stuff in TESCO about 15 mins walk away, (where we were flummoxed trying to comprehend the pre-paid phone system), and finally settled on a Take-Away Kebab shop close to our hotel. The supposedly ‘small’ Doner Kebab turned out to be massive, and I ended up keeping half for next morning! I watched a bit of TV (nothing INTERESTING!!!) before retiring to bed.

To be continued...