Safe, Sound And ... Mildly Culture Shocked

Hmmm. Where to start? Well, I'm safely in England with my mum's family. I'm staying with her aunt and uncle right now. It's lovely being here, especially after such a long journey from Hoedspruit. I think it took me about thirty two hours from when I walked out the door of my house in Hoedspuit to the moment I walked through the door of my aunt's house. The trip was rather uneventful, other than some rather interesting conversations I had with other travelers on route here, like the Italian couple going home to Rome (I think it was). I had to smile when one of the stewards on the flight from Johannesburg said that I looked famous and said he'd seen me somewhere before. It was rather exciting though. I must say that it was hard to believe that I was actually leaving and, as I was waiting in Johannesburg International Airport, I felt like I was dreaming about leaving. I had to remind myself a few times that it wasn't a dream. Even now I still catch myself wondering that. I'm glad thankful that God had made a way for me to make this step, even though there are still trails I have to face and overcome each day.

Now that I'm here, I'm suffering with a rather mild case of culture shock. Everything's different here to what I've gotten used to in South Africa, over the last year. Like the prices, here, are different to prices in South Africa and the way of British life is different to the way of life in South Africa. I'm constantly thinking back to, say, prices in the shops and supermarkets in South Africa and thinking about how expensive everything is  in the UK, compared to the prices in South Africa. I'll get over it quickly, I'll have to. The last few times I've travelled to the UK and the Netherlands the culture shock didn't last very long. I think it will be the same in this situation as well. There have been times when the family hadn't been to the UK and the Netherlands in two or three years and those times we all struggled adjusting to bring in Europe, and when we returned to Uganda we struggled adjusting there as well. In the last four years we've been able to come back every year or so, sometimes more often. So the culture shock hasn't been so bad.

There have been a few new installments in my life since I arrived in the UK on Thursday afternoon. For example, I now have a British SIM card in my phone, so I have a different number to what I had in South Africa. I got it yesterday and it now works really well, though the network does drop from time to time at my aunt's house. Yet I'm pleased with it because I  was able to get one with a really good deal on the data package. This is due to my using Whatsapp to communicate with people more than email or facebook, I think. The other installment is that on Monday I'll be opening a bank account. It's all very exciting for me, especially the whole business of the bank account. I haven't had a bank account since I was about eighteen or nineteen. I'd been banking with one bank in Uganda and had an awful experience with them. So because of that and because of all the traveling I've been doing, I've been reluctant to get one. However, now that I'm looking at being in the UK for a while now, I'm actually looking forwards to having that in place.

Due to the fact that I've arrived in England a few weeks before the BLS starts (on April 10), I'm going to be staying with some friends of my mum's. So on Tuesday, I'm going to stay in Broadstairs. I'm also going to be seeing a few people before the BLS starts. I'm sure that once the school starts (on April 10) I'm going to be very busy with the school, if it's anything like the DTS and I must say that when I did my DTS I had very little time outside the busy schedule. But I  didn't mind that. It was nice being busy, even though it was tiring sometimes. The outreach was also quite hectic, as we sometimes had to work for eight days before we had a day off, but that didn't happen often, towards the end of the outreach, we didn't work as long.

I've decided to condense the captions for all the photos in this blog at the bottom here, as it saves time, tinkering about trying to get the photos themselves to behind, without jumping about. So the first photo is of my second flight, to Johannesburg. The plane was almost empty, which was nice. The second and third pictures are the sunsets I've seen last night and tonight, and the final photo was the last sunset I saw in South Africa, I snapped it just as we were arriving in Johannesburg. The final photo is of a pigeon that had found its way into the departure lounge of the airport in Johannesburg. It was sitting on one of the information signs when I walked out of the restaurant near my gate. It sat on the sign for a while then when flapping about.