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Day 1: The Journey
Perth, Western Australia
After arriving at the airport in the early hours of the 18th, I was finally beginning the looming adventure that has been at the very front of my mind for many months. The anticipation was over and the start of a brand new chapter was finally on the horizon. Myself, standing at 6"1 and Chris standing at a much lengthier 6"6, were keen to explore the options of getting extra leg room on our journey. After to speaking to a woman, who's appearance suggested her name was 'Lorraine', it was clear to see that my charm and overall wit was not enough to convince her that 'eating knees for 21hours' was a genuine 1st world problem; fair enough I guess. After gliding through security without a problem, apart from Chris getting stopped; my only guess is that they suspected he could fit half the worlds supply of cocaine in his size 12 shoes, we worked our way through the crowds and headed towards the food court.
I am well aware that the term 'starving' is only really accurate when describing a famished individual who has not eaten for a duration of time, evidently resulting in near or eventual death, nevertheless.. We were starving. After agreeing that Burger King was an unacceptable breakfast choice, we made our way upstairs to what can only be described as a '4 stripe' Wetherspoons (FYI- Adidas = 3 stripes, K-Swiss = 5 Stripes, Faker than Michael Jacksons nose = 4 Stripes). After a Large Cappuccino and Eggs benedict, that was colder than the war between Russia and the US, it was time to find the toilet for our first game of Battle s***s. Unfortunately a previous player who might have gone overboard, whose name I can only assume was 'Walter Squitty' manage to block them beyond recovery. Nevertheless, we did not let this dampen our spirits and we continued the search for the ideal battle station. Upon our search, Chris discovered that he had mistakenly left his precious sunglasses at home and was not prepared to arrive in Australia to find his retinas dry up like a couple of raisins. With this in mind we headed to duty free where there was an unholy choice of sunglasses. The shop assistant came to our assistance and, after some amount of Ray-Banter, Chris purchased the tortoise shell glasses and we were on our way.
Although you could argue that there should be more on our minds than finding a suitable toilet, strangely this was not the case. Regardless of our already placid, happy go lucky attitudes to all things, for some reason there was no apparent daunt creeping up on either of us. We laughed about how it felt as if we'd merely nipped to the shop for a loaf of bread, rather than embarking on the biggest journey of our lives. I guess that comes with the territory of our nature; feeling an undesirable urge to experience and absorb the many situations and cultures that the world has to present to us, whilst keeping an open mind that people are people and we may encounter a number of differences in regards to opinion, belief and understanding.
Boarding the plane proved to be easier than initially anticipated. The crew were helpful and the queues were flowing. We were both quietly hoping for either an empty seat on our row or a smaller human than ourselves sitting beside us, fortunately we got a petit man from India. I didn't quite catch his name, but he was traveling from Manchester to Abu Dhabi and then Abu Dhabi to New Delhi, with an additional 7-hour coach journey once he had landed on home soil. The flight itself was smooth and the in flight entertainment consisted of the newly released film Legend, starring Tom Hardy as the Kray twins and another film that isn't worth mentioning. The air hostess on our section was initially very sweet, yet as the flight went on her attitude towards us changed dramatically; I'm not sure whether she was having an off day or if she was unkeen on our communication methods, even though we were perfectly pleasant she didn't seem to take a shine to us, shame really.
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