Merry old England

It’s been a while since my last update and in that time I’ve relaxed on deserted beaches, drank more than I should in Samui, said goodbye to some good friends and flown around half the world.

In all I have been swanning around S.E. Asia for about 5 months, 4 of those in the eminently good company of a certain Miss Freeman. We dashed back over to the mainland for a bit of R&R after our rather hectic Laos trip (hard work I know). This included another 5 nights of sitting on a beach, usually with nobody at the resort except the 2 of us and the couple who ran the place. We then returned to Samui for the final week before my flight for the UK departed. Speaking of which, I'd organised the cheapest possible flight I could through my travel agent friend which happened to be with an Airline called Air Astana with a stopover in Almaty. I thought nothing of this at the time but regretted my decision a bit down the track. Anyway, my last week in Thailand was spent being fairly quietly with the last weekend involving dinner on Saturday with my Thai friend (and their predominantly Western partners) and Sunday at a BBQ with the other contingent of people I know. Everything went alright which left me Monday to spend with Marcelle before flying out at 10PM that night. 4AM the following morning we left for Almaty and arrived at about 10AM. We skirted the Western edge of the Tibetan plateau and the scenery was stunning. Snow caped peaks and glaciers as far as the eye can see. All rather impressive. Almaty itself was interesting reminding me of what an industrial European town might have looked like with many squat, dirty building surrounding tall smoke stacks spewing forth dirty clouds of pollution. It was a bit scary that as the plane landed everyone started to applaud with no apparent sarcasm… When I got inside there was no facility for international transfers and only one other person going to London. None of the staff (who all seemed to be part of the Military) spoke English and kept pushing Visa application forms at us. After several minutes of impotent gesticulation (and much poorly disguised mirth at the size and designs of there hats) we finally got an English speaking girl who demanded our passports and disappeared for 15 minutes. I was getting a bit jumpy at this point but she finally returned with our boarding passes and passports. A military type in a VERY large hat then led us to a area where we each had to individually enter a room with opaque windows for questioning. He was fascinated with my iPod and seemed to be suggesting that is was an explosive devise of some sort until I actually got him to listen to some music.

Several hours of plane (plain) travel later I arrived in London and got through customs without too much trouble. It was then out to the Tube to be greeted by the announcement that the train I was on had the ultimate destination of ‘Cockfosters’. I find this amusing at several levels. Well, maybe just one. But I still laughed.

Upon arriving at Brixton I was immediately convinced I would be raped and killed before I’d walked a block. Thankfully Chia came and rescued me from the large dark men and got a beer into me STAT. Thankfully Chia was most generous and agreed to put me up for a couple of weeks which makes the whole process SO much easier than it would have been otherwise. Without this I think I may have curled up in a gutter somewhere with a bottle of cheap wine.

Enough waffle, point form observations of Brixton specifically, and Greater London in general:

• A butcher had a sign proclaiming ‘Tender Meat – No teeth required’.
• You don’t hear that many people actually speaking English on the streets and when you do they sound like Vikky form Little Brittan.
• People here are, by and large, ugly (and large).
• A subsection in the religious section in Borders proclaimed ‘Christianity – Oversized’. I couldn’t agree more.

I'm currently PCless and hence have trouble posting photos so it'll be text only for a bit I'm afraid.