Good evening readers,

I am writing this at the end of a day from hell, one that I fully expect to spill on into tomorrow. I shall begin at the beginning as is traditional in these cases and I apologise for the possibly ranting nature of this entry.

Firstly I was woken up this morning by a vacuum cleaner after a terrible night of sleep due to my continuing cough and resulting rib pain. Already I'm sure you sense this was not a good start to my day. I then decided that after 3 weeks the indian embassy had probably had my passport long enough so I went to the post office to check its progress, only to find out that when I sent off the package I should have included another courier pack so that it could be sent back to me (this is something that I wasn't told by the trainee who served me). This of course meant that my passport couldn't be sent to Queenstown. I then phoned the embassy to discover that there has also been a delay in processing my visa and it will take another 7 working days (which I don't have). As a result of this I had to post another courier pack to the embassy for them to send me my passport minus a visa and I have been forced to cancel my trip to India as I won't be able to get into the country before my trip starts.

Not only do I have to cancel this trip I also have to cancel and change 5 different flights and book another just to get home, clearly this is going to be very costly and complicated. I spent most of this afternoon on the phone and internet trying to contact the various airlines and travel companies with no sucess at all, it was much like repeatedly running into a brick wall and left me with a similar resulting headache!

So that's what's going on in my life at the moment, the upside being that I will undoubtedly see you all a little sooner than expected!

Bye from hell

Love

Katie

--x--