Welcome to the sessions. This is a space where I will periodically journal and post updates on stuff that happens.
Sunday, October 15, 2006
~Day 11: London, Stansted Airport~
Spent the night at the Cork International Youth Hostel. Had a great dialogue with a guy named John Paul from California, who was studying for his PhD in Educational Psychology. We started off talking photography, but it quickly went to vocation, psychology, philosophy, and ultimately religion. We were really getting into it, and before I knew it 2 hours had passed, it was 1am, and I only had 4 hours left before we had to get up to catch our flight out of Cork. Thank goodness we had a car in Cork, because getting to the airport by 6am would have just sucked otherwise. By this time, I'd finished "Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets", so I picked up the 3rd book before we flew.
I have ZERO pictures for you today, folks. Today was just a bit of a weird in-between day in our planning. We'd land in Stansted coming from Ireland, and would fly out to Salzburg from here, but the flights were 24 hours apart. But it isn't worth the 30GBP trip in each direction to London central, and we can't really go anywhere else...so we decided to make it a day of rest.
We shelled out a little extra to book a nice bed and breakfast, since we'd have no other expenses. What we overlooked was the B&B wouldn't open until 4pm, and we were ready to leave the airport by 10am.
There is NOTHING around Stansted, literally nothing but a motorway into London central...so what could we do? There we were, with those 80-pound packs hanging off us, stuck at the airport for the next 6 hours. So we found a comfortable set of seats, set up camp, and just chilled.
We eventually did hop a cab over and check into the B&B, but for most of the day there we were, on a Sunday in London, Stansted, bumming around an airport for the entire day. People coming and going. Those annoying baggage carts with their annoying beeping crawling by every few minutes. Watching the sun move across the sky. I kept shaking my head in disbelief...sitting in an airport, reading, watching the day pass by. What a way to spend a day in Europe.
On the otherhand, I finished "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" within 24 hours of picking it up.
