Today has consisted of a lot of waiting around. The positive thing was that we got to sleep in and get somewhat accustomed to the London time change. The beds in our hotel last night felt AMAZING after spending the night on the plane the night before. Right when my head hit the pillow I was OUT! I slept like a baby. We woke up around 9:45 (London time) and went to eat our free hotel breakfast. I had cereal and toast..both were REALLY good. The only thing that I've noticed about London is that NONE of the bottled drinks are EVER cold enough and you can't find Diet Dr Pepper ANYWHERE! haha!!! It's mostly pepsi products. YUCK! In the hotel, we had access to some computers in the business lounge so we were able to update friends and family back home of our status in London. I've really really missed not being able to pick up the phone and call home. Clint and Gina both have international data plans on their phones so we'll hopefully be able to keep updating once we get to Africa. Lauren has been the only one responding to any of my text or facebook messages....thank you sister! haha! I hate that I won't be with her, or able to call her on her birthday. :( I know she's getting excited because the first SEC baseball games are this weekend against LSU. I'll be cheering on the HOGS all the way from Malawi. WOO PIG SOOIE! Anyway...so after breakfast we all met downstairs around 11 to head to the airport to find out if we had tickets or not. We rode in a taxi- it somewhat freaked me out that the driver was driving from the right side of the car and on the left side of the road! We made it to the airport around noon and at that point STILL didn't have tickets reserved for the flight to Addis Ababa. We found out after all the chaos yesterday that it wasn't technically all United's fault that we didn't have our tickets last night-but Ethiopian Air's fault. Who knows?! It was he said, she said?!? After being at the airport a few hours, Clint checked on our tickets again and finally we had confirmation that we were booked for the 10:05 pm Addis flight. Even though we would have to spend the whole day in the airport...this was the best case scenario because the other option was leaving at 6:00 and flying 4 extra hours to Johannesburg then north to Lilongwe. So...flights...CHECK! THANK GOODNESS! There was a point yesterday when I honestly didn't know whether we'd even get to Africa. Even though we're not sure why, we know that all this delay was in God's plan for our trip. Okay...now it's lunch time. London airport food=BLAH! :( but we did find some pretty amazing pizza for a decent price so we decided to all split those. After lunch, most of our day consisted of sitting around playing spoons (of which we never finished a game we started...I think we have at least 3 games going now). We realized pretty quickly how LOUD us Americans are compared to others. We got A LOT OF STARES. Around 5:30 today we were finally able to get our actual boarding passes. One thing that kind of startled us was that they said our carry on had to weigh less than 7 kilos (15 lbs) or we'd have to pay a crazy amt per kilos it was over weight. Almost everyone's carry on was too heavy but we managed to reorganize stuff to get by without paying extra. I was thankful because I had spent all the money I wanted to spend in London. That pound to dollar currency exchange is NO FUN! I'm starting to not like London so much...most of the people we've come across are NOT SO NICE. haha! The rest of the time we had before going through security again was spent laughing and chatting and practicing our "evangecube". We would use this all week to share the gospel in Malawi. They're pretty neat. I loveeee our team...they're all so much fun to be around...so far no problems between team members. Everyone has taken all the setbacks and delays really well. I've decided that London is not my favorite places though...it's neat and historic and all...but I don't know if I'll ever have the desire to go back. Everything is too stinkin' expensive. I went and looked around at some of the shops in the airport and I feel like if in America it costs $50 they just drop the $ and add the pound sign. That means I WILL NEVER SHOP THERE! haha! So...now it's time to go through security and sit for a little while longer before we board at 9:05. We get on the plane around 9:30 and take off around 10:10 or so (5:10 US time.) It's now 1:00 am London time (we're gaining a few hours while in the air so technically it's probably later than that). We definitely lucked out with our seats on this plane. Me, Abbie and Tyler are on the first row of economy class so we have LOTS of leg room. "it's like a footrest" HA! I'm a little jealous of the first class people thought...we asked if they'd bump us up (because there are only 4 people sitting up there with 12 seats open...perfect for our team of 12...but thy didn't go for it. It would have been about 350 pounds to upgrade...no thanks! We did make friends with our flight attendant though. She's SO sweet and beautiful. She took pictures of us and with us on the plane. We just finished dinner about 30 mins ago. I was VERY apprehensive about eating it...we had the choice of beef or fish. I chose beef and it actually wasn't too bad (this meal eventually would make me NAUSEOUS everytime i'd think about it though.) Clint has me paranoid about eating/drinking anything that has been touched by their water...so no salad or ice cubes...which means drinking a hot coke right out of the can. Well...i'm starting to get pretty sleepy and we've got about 4-5 hours to try to get some sleep before we switch planes in Addis Ababa (does that have anything to do with Aladdin?) I keep singing that Ali Ababa song! HA! Praying everything goes smoothly on our next plane change! GOODNIGHT ALL! :)
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