Ready....steady....

Summer
Originally uploaded by m.aquila.

You would recall that I was supposed to fly to the UK yesterday but I had to postpone the trip because my visa had still not come through.

It should therefore come as no surprise whatsoever that no sooner had I rescheduled the trip and renegotiated my work start date, I got a message from the visa processors to say that my application had been approved. As I write this, my paperwork is in the back of a truck somewhere, on its way back to me. Typical.

I went to the travel agent yesterday and collected my revised airline ticket, so I'm set for a 13 June departure. I'll arrive in London on 14 June and start work the next day. I figure that by the weekend, the jetlag hallucinations will have abated. Well, we can only hope.

I also booked some hotel accommodation for the first two days, before my temporary couch surfing career begins. I'm going to be holed up in Bayswater, at a budget hotel around the corner from Whiteleys, the oldest shopping centre in London. I am pretty sure that in two short days, I will become very accustomed to living the Bayswater life. But from what I know of the area, from browsing accommodation ads, I probably can't afford to live there.

Never say never though, right? I mean, stranger things have happened. Perhaps while browsing at Whiteleys I will meet an old lady who lives alone in a palatial home (no cats) and who has an entire fully-furnished floor space that she'd like to rent to me. And then the old lady decides she can't handle the London climate anymore and she buys a house in Spain and gives me the run of the house in return for keeping it neat and clean.

Uh oh, the jetlag hallucinations have started and I haven't even taken off yet....