Greetings from Abu Dhabi!

Hello!

I am in Abu Dhabi and I want to write this down before I forget. Sadly, my camera was not very reachable as I landed and thanks to being close to the equator, the sun set super quickly and now it is too dark for photos.

Firstly, I am flying with Etihad, the airline of the Unite Arab Emirates. It has (so far) been AWESOME. I felt like I was on first class. Everything is new, so the chairs are not 90 degree torture devices, they are ergonomic, jazzily striped, and glorious. The head pillows are ADJUSTABLE. The flight attendants were lovely (and spoke about 8 languages between them from Swahili to Dutch to Arabic) and they just kept on FEEDING ME. I had ordered a veggie meal, so I got an Indian dish for lunch, then a grilled veggie sandwich for second lunch, but then they also gave me the regular second lunch meal (which happened to be cheese and mushroom pizza ). Endless refills of water, coffee, juice, etc. AND a personal TV screen unlike my flight to London. AND the TV screens have little remotes you can use since the touchscreens are super annoying AND on the reverse of said remotes is a gaming control to play games. Not to mention an incredibly luxurious blanky! I am impressed.

Now let me paint the scene of our landing. We landed around 6:40pm as the sun was setting. I have never seen a desert before and it was amazing. So strange to look down and see a whole world glowing yellows and oranges instead of greens, blues and browns. The houses matched the sand and were also beigy white, so they also took on the colours of the sunset. The sun itself looked like something out of Star Wars: incredibly orange, huge, perfectly round and not surrounded by any colourful clouds (probably due to the lack of clouds/water). Sparse desert vegetation speckled the ground with a few palm trees lining the highway. As I said, the sun set almost instantly and my view then became a world of magical blue (you know what I mean, Achkar) dotted with glittering lights. Even the airplane tower is beautiful; it is built in an elegant crescent shape. All in all, still very impressed.

Next, I will paint a picture of what I look like. I am a minority here, which is pretty interesting. Not only in race, but I also seem to be the only person travelling in rain boots. Are they not popular here? I am wearing leggings and a tshirt for comfort, and then rainboots, a pashmina and a blazer because they were heavy for my luggage (which I again made weight with!). To complete my look, I am carrying a giant travel back pack, and a laptop case with bright red writing that says "Birth" with a somewhat creepy photo of a baby in a belly (I know you think it's beautiful mom, but fetuses are creepy!). I don't think Abu Dhabi is as impressed, but what can you do.

So in conclusion, my travels are going very well and I board for Seoul in less than an hour. Strange thought to think I will be arriving there tomorrow morning.

Speaking of boarding, that reminds me of one other awesome thing about Etihad: we actually boarded on time. I promise they are not endorsing this blog post.

Thanks again to my wonderful friend Lauren for allowing me to stay with her in glorious London. I had a spectacular time!

London London London

Just a quick update that London is pretty damn cool. I am staying at a friend's place in Islington. Pretty much, this neighbourhood is awesome. It has everything you could possibly need, yet still feels super quaint compared to the insanity (exciting insanity) that is downtown. We saw Les Miserables today, which was obviously amazing. So fun to hear all the little bits of song that I didn't know from the soundtrack.

Rather self explanatory shot

Natural History Museum

 

I may have been equally if not more excited by this
dinosaur exhibit than most of the children....

A part of Cambridge campus

Beautiful Cambridge

We've been pretty busy everyday, so looks like we won't be Sister Act-ing in St Paul's after all. Only 2 more days and I am off to KOREA so I need to start doing laundry and re-packing. I stop off in Abu Dhabi on my way for 3 hours. I'm so excited!

Introduction: Packing is the worst.

Hello!

This is my first blog post, how exciting.

I will be using this blog to chronicle my journey throughout South Korea, where I will be teaching English as a second language. I will be teaching with EPIK - English Programme in Korea, which is the government public school system. If I make any grammar errors it will be very embarrassing. I just almost misspelled embarrassing. How embarrassing.

My first adventure was trying to pack a year's worth of life into a single suitcase. That weighed 23kg. If this doesn't sound incredibly difficult, let me assure you that it is. The airline I am flying to Korea with, Etihad, has a strict weight limit and they charge per kilogram of overweight-ness. An extra 5kg costs 255USD! So.. with the help of space bags, loud music, and my mother's bathroom scale, I magically pulled it off. I ended up packing about half of what I wanted, but my bag was 23.1kg at the airport! I flew from Montreal to Toronto and everything was fine.. however I then flew from Toronto to London (I'm taking a 10 day pit stop here to help my friend Lauren move into an apartment and see London) with Transat who weighed my carry on. It was 8kg, 3kg overweight... But she was nice and let me slide through. Lucky. Also somehow my suitcase became 24kg. Weird. Hopefully my charm will work on the Etihad workers as well.

Before

After! The shorts didn't make it...

So now I am journeying through London! Today I went to Borough Market and St Paul's Cathedral. The market was absolutely amazing, and is probably one of my favourite places I've ever been to. St Paul's was pretty, but it cost money to go inside.. So we are thinking of just going to a service later because that is free. There's a singing service so that shouldn't be too bad. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure the singing won't involve Whoopi Goldberg singing "Oh Happy Day".

Photos from the market: