Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Arrival at Cambridge

Written on June 22, 2010

Traveling between NYC and Cambridge was a really long and dragged out process. Still feeling tired and jetlagged from it. I left the apartment at 4pm and it took 1.5 hrs to get to the airport. I walked around to find elevators instead of dragging my luggage up and downstairs. I still had 2 hours to spare before the plane leaves. I realized I've never been in the JFK international terminal before. It is the most inefficient terminal ever!

First it took me forever to find the bathrooms. I wanted to change before going checking in my luggage. I did the self-check in, which is supposed to make the check-in process faster. But it didn't because the baggage drop people just ended up having to look up your reservation again to print out the luggage tags. So I stood in line for an hour for this luggage tag. And then had to drag my luggage to this place where they scanned all the luggage. So there were 3 things to go through, just for your luggage. And then there was this bottleneck at security because they had only 1 person checking people's passports. Usually it's very fast but they wanted to check more thoroughly so the line got really long. After that, we finally got to go through actual security and hand off our carry ons to be x-rayed. When I finally go to the boarding area, it was almost time to board the plane.

The flight was pretty full again and this guy got put into the middle seat between me and another woman. This guy was kind of weird. He wore a hat the entire time. It looked like the ones that they give out at ESP things but higher quality, maybe? I just find it strange that people would wear hats indoors. What is the purpose of a hat again? Seriously. And he had the fan on full blast the entire time.

Our flight was delayed getting off the ground. We didn't actually takeoff until an hour after our scheduled departure time. We still managed to get to Heathrow around the same time though.

I didn't sleep very much the entire flight because it was still early evening in New York time. I probably should've taken some sleeping pills to help me sleep because I got airsick at the end. Even got a little sick on the bus ride to Cambridge.

There was a really, really long line at customs at Heathrow. It took an hour or so to get through. I was pretty nervous about missing my bus while standing in line. I was hoping to get on an earlier bus but this turned out to be too ambitious. I managed to buy a sim card and top it up at the airport. I think at the end of this trip, I will have a ton of different currency and sim cards.

My bus took me to Stansted airport before going on to Cambridge. I think this was a shorter trip than the “direct” Cambridge bus from Heathrow, which goes by Luton on the way. Glad I took this route though because I met a woman from Indonesia at Stansted. Her daughter is graduating Cambridge this year. So we chatted and she gave me her contact info in Jakarta. I wish I was a little more lucid so that we can chat more. But I was pretty tired.

The friend I'm staying with met me at the bus stop at Cambridge. I showered and slept after I settled in. Hoping to meet up some people later on today and tomorrow. Hopefully I won't be too jetlagged.

3 comments:

Yalu said...

Wow seems rough! Glad you got there safely though. Maybe you should start a Sim card collection along with coins

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