Finding the fun in 28 hours

After a 28 hour journey I have made it safely to South Africa. And I’m pleased to say it all went preeeeetty smoothly. 🙂

After arriving at Heathrow, eager to get this show on the road (literally!) I joined the BA queue, residing with a lovely looking smiley young girl who’s obviously so efficient that her queue turned out to be the shortest too. 

Just before I pace forward to send my suitcase on its way, suddenly it’s an “ALL CHANGE” as the young girl takes her break and is replaced with what appears to be a male version of Roz from Monsters Inc – bar the red lipstick and trail of slime – estimated age: 150.

He sort of grunts at me as I greet him and that’s the most I get out of him. 

Oh well, on I go. 

Proceeding merrily through security I beep through the metal detector (still don’t know what set it off). In addition to the usual pat-down, I had to climb into some sort of scanning capsule, waving my arms in the air as it circled around my body, feeling like I was about to enter some sort of MI5 mission (I would be great in one of those). Finishing with a scan of my Nike runners I was on my way. 

After three hours of phonecalls, snapchats and endless games of trivial pursuit against myself, I board the plane. 

As I pray that last month’s plane neighbours don’t reappear (the raging drunks, see previous post) it appears that the two young German boys who have been in front of me in the queue are actually in the seats next to me. Ah yes German boys, perhaps if they are rowdy I can practice the only German word I enjoy saying in my angriest accent “SCHMETTERLING” (Translation: butterfly)

However, after half-listening to them chattering away for the first hour of the flight, I realise they’re actually Irish – oops, still didn’t understand them. 

The only good thing on the plane tv this time was episodes of Faulty Towers (love that!), but after I exhausted all of those two episodes I tried to get some rest. 

Trying to get to sleep by leaning against a plane window is actually like a 10-piece percussion band has climbed down your ear canal, using your ear drum as the main instrument. But no bother…a couple of bottles of white wine and I was gone.

You’ll be pleased (or disappointed) to hear that after landing at Johannesburg, I got through security and was reunited with my suitcase pretty swiftly. 

So after a four hour wait at the African airport I thought I should probably get some food. 

Wimpy was about the only decent thing there so I ordered a takeaway chicken burger. 

I was happy to wait as I still had a further two hours until my next flight, but evidently the woman taking orders was not! 

After only about four and a half minutes of waiting suddenly she starts screaming through the window into the kitchen in Afrikaans! All I could make out was “chicken burger” (which she repeated about 37 times) I genuinely thought there was going to be a fist fight through the juice machine, meanwhile a fellow colleague, also taking orders, who appeared to have some chewing gum stuck on top of her 2008 Rihanna weave, started aggressively pushing the first woman in an attempt to get her to stop screaming. 

Welcome back to South Africa indeed.