Sunday 10 July 2016

FJ to UK - let the QYL journey begin

Let the journey begin. 

First I must say that it took a lot of energy to mentally, psychologically and physically prepare for this trip. There were a lot of mixed emotions and I tried to keep my excitement on a low. If you wondering why, you read about it here

Tuesday: 14th June. 
Since it is the holy month of Ramadan I woke up around 4am for Suhur and later went into work.I spent the day at work making sure I had handed over documents to my team and set up my vacation notice. I came home for Iftari and got busy with my final assignment for the semester. I thought if I was tired enough I could sleep on the flights (I just cant sleep on the 
flights). And I ended up staying up all night. 

Wednesday 15th June.
5.15am - We left Suva for Nadi. 4 hours later we were in Nadi and I slept for an hour in the car. We stopped over for breakfast and headed down to the airport. Check in time started at 11am and after checking in I waited for Luisa (QYL 2016). We ate at the airport and went on inside before boarding time. The flight left around 2pm and we were headed for NZ! 

5pm we arrived in NZ and went looking for the emirates counter to get our boarding passes. Lucky for airport WiFi we also contacted the QYL's from NZ and Tonga and met up with them. 
Next leg was from NZ - Dubai. Luisa and I had seats together and believe when I say I never want to fly this route ever again in my life. 18 hours!!! 18 hours has a few hours to many to be on a flight. The food on emirates was great! Lucky once again. but sitting there for so long and it was a night flight so most of the people are sleeping and I felt bad turning on the little lights and doing some reading/writing. I tried really hard to sleep. When I woke up I thought at least 3 hours would have passed - behold - I was asleep for 45mins. I attempted this maybe 3 or 4 times and each time I woke up in less then one hour. After that I gave up and watched the TV Show Blackish. Hilarious show by the way. There is only so much walking around you can do on the flight so it was a very tiring flight indeed. 
FINALLY we were in Dubai. 

As we headed to our gate we met with QYL from Australia, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. We had a little QYL Pacific family. And this felt great. Before you know it we had to board our flight to London. 

Only another 8 hours and we would be in London. Once again I tried to sleep but had very little luck so I carried on watching movies in flight. It amazed me that the flight had WiFi. Thank you Emirates! You are the best airline so far.

And finally we touched down at Heathrow airport in London. FINALLY we were here. I know all the QYL's were excited to be here - but I almost cried. After last year I wasn't sure if I would make it, but I did. The boarder security lines were long but the staff was nice and we were out in LONDON. 


Thursday 16th June 12.45pm we are in LONDON. This was Thursday 11.45pm back in Fiji. 
The QYL volunteers greeted us at arrival and we headed to Goodenough College on a big blue coach (double deck) bus. YUP!! This was my first time on a double deck bus. The The Pacific Islanders were already chatting and laughing. This was a great sign to the beginning of a new friendship. 

The residential week has only just started. 







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