On the way to England.

Alright folks, it appears my blog is back up for a few weeks by popular demand. That means a lot to me, really!

I took a direct flight from Chicago to London which was mostly uneventful except that I was sitting near an irish girl who'd been staying in chicago for 7 weeks. Usually, as most Americans know, Chicago is a sort of second rate destination city for travelers, so I was extremely happy to hear she'd chosen to spend her summer there. In the end, she told me she'd spent her time in Lincoln Park (an area I essentially avoid) and told me she missed out on all the things that I actually like in Chicago, and only partook of the things which I mostly dislike. Oh well, at least we had a few europeans enjoying chicago, I guess I can't complain too much.

In the meantime I spent a great deal of time waxing on about the many ways english speakers from different cultures say things. It was interesting for me, and me next seat friend told me repeatedly, "you spend way too much time thinking about that." Although, I did manage to procure a lot of information from her about several things she found bizarre about the United States. Principally, and this is no surprise to anyone who likes going out for drinks, is that 21 is the legal drinking age. She highly disapproved of this. She also seemed to dislike the fact that we don't say "bin" for "trash can." You know, the bin, where you put the rubbish?

Once in Heathrow Airport, I stood in the longest customs line I've ever been in. It literally (pronounced here, litrally) took me 2 hours to get my passport stamped. And that's just to get into the UK, hell really just England. But, while waiting I got to do some interesting exhaustion based people watching. There were two groups that stood out. First, a man with three wives who had them all wearing niqab. I kept wanting to see what happened when they actually got to the immigration desk to see if they had to show their faces. I missed it, but later after baggage claim, the man looked fairly calm. I can't imagine anything particularly exciting happened. But, I'm always a bit amused when muslim women have to show their faces. It's well known that niqab is not required, I can't help being slightly amused at it's principal according to islam. Nonetheless, that was the less interesting group of people. There more interesting group of people was a group of young girls all wearing matching soccer shirts and their parents. Apparently they are San Antonio United and they were passing through the old country on the way to Sweden for the Gothia Cup which is the youth world cup in Sweden. 84 teams, all the players very, very young. I was taken aback a little. Anyway, I wish them luck. They're first game is monday, and I'll try to keep up with it and update you, dear readers, here from the blog (back by popular request).

Finally made it through, almost lost my luggage, because all our luggage had been unloaded and sorted, and placed in a neat pile. My luggage, however, is really small. I've packed EXTREMELY lightly for 6 weeks travel. In any case, I recovered it and got set to get to the hotel to take a nap after my one hour of sleep on the place with seats too small for me to properly sit in.