25 Hours & 11 Minutes In

25 Hours & 11 Minutes In

I’m writing this from Heathrow Airport at 1:36pm Perth time, which is 5:36am London time.

Whether or not I will actually be able to post it at any point in the near future I don’t know, as Heathrow does not appear to have any free wireless access. In fact, the network entitled ‘Heathrow Free Public Wireless’ asked me for my credit card details.

This...

...is my home for the next seven or so hours, until I can board my flight to Madrid. I’m over halfway there, amigos!

My flight from Perth to Singapore was ridiculously empty. There were only 42 people on the plane. It was an uneventful enough flight – I was perfectly happy with plenty of room,

my iPod,

and a good view.

Singapore airport provided me with just enough entertainment for the six hours that I was there. I attempted to play an Xbox for a while, did a bit of window shopping, found myself some dinner and had a shower.

(On that – if anyone’s ever stuck at Changi Airport for an extended period of time, the showers are well worth the $8 – they’re bigger than my bathroom at home and all toiletries are provided. Ahhh.)

When it was time to board my flight to London, these were the types of people that were milling around the gate.

The flight was filled with retirees. I’d say there were about 20 people on the aeroplane that were under the age of seventy. They provided a soundtrack of a wheezing cough they all seemed to have caught, and the occasional tooth rattle.

The bloke behind me – an eighty-year-old from Liverpool – said some truly hilarious things throughout the flight that I wish I’d written down. (For those who know Como’s Red Cardigan Guy, he was possibly Liverpool’s attempt to recreate him.) My favourite of many gems was; “Why don’t as many people smoke these days? When I was young, every schoolboy had a cigarette most hours of the day. No kids have the guts to smoke these days. They’re all too busy fiddling about with their iPops.”

(When I find out what an ‘iPop’ is, I’ll let you know.)

I shared three seats with a lovely woman called Daisy on the 14-hour-long flight, who was able to explain the reason for the disproportionate age demographics on the flight. She and her fellow retirees were all Londoners who had signed up for an Over Sixty’s Only Cruise, which had ended up in Singapore.

Daisy was delighted to hear that I was off to Spain on exchange, because she owns a holiday home just outside Madrid. She quickly taught me all the Spanish she knew, and gave me a list of all the places she thought would be best to visit.

I managed to squeeze ten hours of half-sleep (which I suppose is equal to five hours of full sleep?), a movie and my last Spanish tape in to the flight.

Descending in to London at the time I did in the morning gave an incredible view. As the plane turned to land, the full moon was suddenly right outside my window; it made all the clouds and smog glow an awesome, vibrant blue. In some parts – where the light was shining up through the clouds from the land – the clouds glowed a plum colour.

It would have made an amazing photo, but of course they didn’t turn out.

So now I’m at Heathrow, where – as I said – I will be stuck for a ridiculously long time. Finally –

10 Things That I Have Learned/That Amused Me Travelling Alone:

1. If you’re my age and gender, and you’re looking at an airport map, nearly everyone around you will assume that you are lost and offer to take you to the Information Desk. When you thank them but explain that you’re just checking to see where the nearest payphone is, some people still insist that you should head to the Information Desk “just to be sure”. To be sure of what?

2. Burger King in Singapore have just released a burger with four beef patties in it.

3. The airport security at Heathrow are not happy chappies at 5am. While making a bad joke in an attempt to cheer them up will be fruitless, it is likely to get a chuckle out of a few of the American businessmen in front of you.

4. At Changi Airport, the ‘No Smoking’ signs do not appear to apply to the security staff.

5. Wearing a Penrhos College leavers’ jacket will have people assume you are Welsh. If chatting to senior citizens from London, you may be told things like “your accent isn’t too vicious, for a Welsh girl”.

6. Terminal 3’s Dunkin Donuts at Changi Airport sells muffins, cheesecakes and smoothies – but not doughnuts.

7. Even if the airport security assure you that your boots will not set the metal detector off, they will.

8. If you get a blood nose on an aeroplane, be sure to enunciate when explaining this to the stewards. When the lovely British Airways steward returned a few minutes later with a heat pack instead of tissues, it became apparent that he thought I’d said I had a “cold nose”.

9. In Singapore, a new fad seems to be disposable bits of tissue paper to fit over iPod earphones, known as ‘Sterilization Pads’. For $10 for a pack of 7 pairs, they are clearly a rip off.

10. Finally – no matter how polite and considerate you try to be, if you have a window seat and you attempt to go to the bathroom while the lights are off during a flight, it isn’t unlikely that you’ll trip over a stray pillow, elbow two men in the head, have their shouts wake people up, and make several enemies. Oops!