United Kingdom

Hi everyone (Krystal typing),

we arrived safe and sound in London to put our trip on pause for a little as it's back to the real world for now.

Our flight from Jordan to London via Germany was over booked, so we opted to wait for the next flight that was 24 hours later. They were going to put us up in a hotel and pay for all other meals..... plus give us 600 euros each!!!! So yeh we didn't mind being delayed! As it turns out they put us on a direct flight that morning and we arrived in London 2 hours later than our orginal flight. 1200 euros, not bad for a 2 hour delay! So yeh that was a real good ending to our tripping around, we get to say goodbye to our credit card debt!

I managed to land a job last Friday, I start tomorrow, will be strange having to get up for work again! Matt has been contact with a few recuritment agencies and is hoping to get some work soon.

We went house hunting over the weekend, which was abit of a nightmare! The first place was more like a dungen. It had real bad lighting and no living room, so you pretty much just live as hermits. Plus the bathroom had nice pretty moldey coloured carpet and the bedroom was painted with life size pink panthers! The second place wasn't much improvement, we got to the front and decided that was enough, it was sort of comission styled buildings. The third place was sort of the bronks of London, heaps of drug dealers and prosties. So yeh, it was nearing dinner time and we though okay we'll just look at one more place. Jumped on the net and found this nice little apartment with photos and we thought we HAVE to check that one out. After looking at it we put a deposit down the following day, and move in this Saturday! It's a 3 bedroom apart that we'll be sharing with 2 other couples, about 30 minutes out of town on the tube. Really roomy and fairly new. We will send thru pics and our land line, plus our new UK mobile numbers via email in the next couple of days.

It has been an awesome couple of months, we covered alot of km as you can see from the map. Can't wait to do it all again!

Bye bye for now

Krystal and Matt
XX

Hi everyone,

Sunday the 26th

Well after Krystal left me is the Aussie Bar on Sunday afternoon to watch the bombers play the tigers there was a problem with the network and the only bit of footy that I saw was the last 2 minutes!!! Was a great 2 minutes too! Essendon losing to the bottm side on the most important day of the clubs history. Anyway enough footy talk i think. While the footy was down I had the pleasure of meeting an aussie who lives in both Phuket and Melbourne. he has a Thai girlfriend and they just had their first child together. It was a really good afternoon as we were able to get an insight on a local perspective of the place. He told us stories about the tsunami and the tricks of the trade when buying things. Also he let us know that for as little as 1000baht (about $40) you can have a lovely lady (or man) for the evening! Was a great couple of hours and a pity we had to leave but we had a plane to catch back to Bangkok.

Monday the 27th

Once we arrived into Bangkok airport around 1:30am we had the pleasure of spending the next 11 hours there! We managed to make a coupld of beds out of some of the airport chairs and i think we squeezed in about 2-3 hours sleep in until we were woken by a bunch of squabbling Indians! They sound like a pack of seagulls at the beach trying to get a chip for lunch!

Once we finally boarded onto our flight we were a little unsure as to whether it was a trip to London for a trip to Disneyland! There were more kids on the darn thing than adults. It was a like a daycare centre for free. Plenty of tears all flight through so we had no option but to find an alternative to get through the situation as you can see below.......

Once we arrived into Heathrow around 6:30pm we had to find a new Hostel as the one that Krystal had booked 4 months ago cancelled on us! Lucky we booked in advance. We managed to get one but had to pay £50 which was 2 1/2 times more than the orginal. Finally got there and passed out in a matter of seconds due to the fact we were very very sleep deprived!

Tuesday the 28th

We got up nice and early and headed over to Oxford St for our 1st contact meeting where we got our UK sim cards and setup a new UK bank acocunt. After that we headed over to Queen St for Krystal to have a meeting with the recruitment company. Once we finshed up there we headed of to Southend-On-Sea where John Bunkers Mum was ever so kind to put us up for a couple of nights. And kind she was!!! Roast chicken and fresh homegrown vegies was just the thing that we needed. Had an early night due to the fact we were stil trying to catch up from the previous couple of days.

Wednesday the 29th

Today we decided to have a wonder round Southend-On-Sea so we packed out daypack and headed on foot down to the water. Once there we wondered around for a while until we reached the WORLDS longest pier. Pleasure Pier was its name but i'm not sure why because once you walk form one end to the other you are more buggered than pleasured! We decided that is was a good idea to get the tram back (it runs up and down the pier) as another walk would have killed us!

Back on dry land there was an amusement park which looked pretty cool and a roller coaster on there that I had to have at least one go on. I was all alone though as Krystal said she had to hold the bag. Otherwise she said she would have gone on it for sure (I found that a little hard to believe). Once we had our fun we headed back to Olive's and made her dinner for putting us up.

Thursday the 30th

We got up nice and early this morning and repacked our bags ready for contiki. Once done we said our goodbyes and thanks to Olive and headed to the train station to get back to London. This is where the pound hit us for the first time. £25 ($60) to get a train 40 minutes back to London!!!!! About the same distance as Sunbury to the city. Once back in London we went to the Contiki hotel to check in but for some reason they only have Krystal on record. I am on the street for the evening!!! Bron what have you done!!! Nah only joking they sorted it out and we paid for the room again and will speak to our Travel Agents about. Now we are currently sitting in an internet cafe writing this sitting next to a crazy man singing about killing people and that he doesn't care if we die. Oh and he stinks like urine too!

Love to you all.

M&K

P.S We added a bunch of photo's to the other entries if you wanna scroll through them.