Here Am I: Tired, Bored, and Jetlagged

(This was written on Monday, 28^th J)

Normally I wouldn’t be bored here in England, its an absolutely beautiful country, and with so many places, and family to visit there’s a lot to do. However, seeing as I slept for 2 hours after dinner this evening (stupid, I know L), now at midnight I am unfortunately wiiiide awake. And with almost everyone else in bed, no internet at the house that we are staying at (we can only get a connection at my grandma’s house), and having already read an entire book since lunch time, there’s not much for me to do. So I’m sitting here at 12:30am, drinking Ribena, listening to music on my computer, and writing this blog post on Word which I will publish tomorrow morning.

First of all, here are a couple of pictures from when we were saying goodbye to everyone at the Vancouver airport on Saturday. It was so great of everyone to come out to see us off, although that did mean that there were quite a few more tears L

Last time in our l.o.v.e.l.y. old van :S

On our way!! (this is after the 9 hour flight from Vancouver to London, about to board the flight from London to Manchester.... we don't look too bad for having just gotten off of a plane!! :D)

We were met at the airport in Manchester by absolutely everyone in our family over here, minus a couple of cousins… it was almost as big of a crowd as the bunch that saw us off in Vancouver.

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Alright welllll I eventually fell asleep while writing that last night, so I’ll have to finish it now. Its now 10pm the next night (Tue 29^th) but this time I’m exhausted. I didn’t let myself sleep at all during the day today, and I’m trying to last until 10:30 tonight in hopes that I’ll be able to sleep all night and finally beat the jetlag! Last night I didn’t actually go to sleep entirely until 2:30 in the morning… and then slept until nearly noon. Which definitely didn’t help my jetlag at all! I’m hoping that once I beat this, the next stages of our trip (Santorini, Egypt, Uganda and finally to South Africa) won’t be bad at all, as they are all within 1-2 hours of each other time-zone wise.

Anyway, in case anybody happened to be wondering, transport is a little tricky for us over here. The last time we were here we all just piled into my grandma’s 5-seater car (Josh sat on the floor :P). Now this time, with Ayana and Moses added into the mix, there are 8 of us (including my grandma), which wouldn’t really be as easy to fit into 5 seats. So we had to rent a car.. which means that someone has to drive it. And since my dad isn’t comfortable driving on the right side of the road yet, and I definitely am not up to trying it (plus I can’t drive standard), its up to my mom. She did get her license here, and obviously drove around all the time before she moved to Canada, but its been years since then. She wasn’t too excited about it, especially since our rented car is quite big, and very long, but she’s done so great, I’m jealous :P I miss driving already, but there’s no way that I’ll be able to drive standard and right-hand drive for quiiiiitte a while. I wish I could, and I will have to learn eventually if I want to be able to drive in South Africa, but for now I’m just nervous about it!

Well yesterday we all went to take my grandma’s dog Mac for a walk, and then went to the library. Haha it doesn’t sound very interesting as I’m writing it down, but seriously, England is so so beautiful!! Everything here in Congleton is so old and historical, with cobbled streets and black and white building, and little shops like “Mr Simm’s Old Sweet Shoppe”. Just walking around, in the park, or the streets, or just down the road is all so gorgeous. And everyone’s accents here are so great too. I just love accents, and here you can’t walk down the road one step without hearing someone’s accent, I love it! And going to the library was great… since I packed up all of my books for shipping, I haven’t read any real books for about 2 months. I was so sick of having nothing to read that I found myself reading my brother’s “Ancient Rome Puzzle Story” book. Quite thrilling. So getting some good books was great, even if it doesn’t sound as fun to other people as it does to me. :P

Anyway, its almost 10:30 and I’m barely awake enough to be typing this right now, so I guess that’s all for now. I’ll post this tomorrow in the morning/afternoon when we go to my grandma’s house for more internet connection. And hopefully all the pictures will work as well (the pictures underneath are from Congleton, just walking around J)!

Well, goodnight for now, I’ll post some more another day. <3