September 15th

In the interest of keeping certain parties apprised of my endeavor in merry ol’ England, I am going to be maintaining a semi-regular blog to let people know what’s happening across the pond. It’ll also have pictures so that my illiterate fans can still get in on the fun.

The flight over was uneventful. The movies were blah and I wasn’t very hungry, so I ate little food. The food that I actually ate was good, as one comes to expect from Virgin Atlantic. After landing, I began to understand why red-eye flights are named thus. After landing, my eyes really freakin’ hurt.

Getting through the airport was terrible. Mostly because of customs. The British are supposed to be mind-numbingly efficient, next to the Germans and the Japanese. This is not true. I found out today. In fact, it took me four hours and some change to find out how inefficient the British really can be. Arriving in British customs, I pass a line of people filled mostly with people from China and India. “Chumps…” I think to myself. When I got closer to customs I realize that the line is comprised of first time students to the U.K. and that I need to go get at the end of it. A sign letting me know an eighth of a mile beforehand would have been helpful. When I finally make it to the end, the size of the line has doubled. Sorry. I mean the queue has doubled.

I tried talking to the small army of Nepalese people next to me, but they only speak just enough English to aggravate the customs officials. Go figure. There’s a girl behind me, but she’s consistently on the phone to someone who is really concerned with her position in the line. This person would call ( I counted) twelve times. Actually, that number might be fair, considering I stood in line for one sixth of a day. It might have gone just a bit quicker if ( and I’m only speculating here) the British Airport Authority or whatever it’s called, posted more than two people at any given time to process the THREE HUNDRED PLUS that were standing in line. The math is actually quite scary. Each person took between five to ten minutes to get processed. Let’s average that to seven per person. Okay, so seven times three hundred is twenty-one hundred minutes. Divide that by sixty and you get…thirty five hours. We hardly moved in the duration of two. After two and a half hours passed, somebody wised up and sent another ten people down to customs to process the students. I finally got out of the damn queue at 11:15 GMT

From here the story gets a little more upbeat. Let’s be honest. I am really excited to be here. It hasn’t even really sunk in yet for me. But I’m here and there appears to be lots to do over the next few weeks. I’m stoked.

There are a lot of Americans here, though. I hope some of them are affable. The only person I’ve talked to so far is from Malaysia. Otherwise, I’ve been too tired to be anything other than polite. Now that I got all me affects squared in me cabin, I’ll go make some friends.

Zai jian friends.

- Jonathan “Not Gonna Let Four Hours in a Queue Get Me Down” Trenary