Faith

I finally arrived in glasgow, scotland at 1020hrs on the 23rd of dec. My flight from singapore to london's heathrow airport was delayed by one and a half hours. why?? - the plane which arrived from perth was making a stopover in singapore before continuing it's journey to london. it seems that a passenger bought a ticket to fly from perth to london but decided to stay in singapore instead. as all of u know, passengers on transit are not allowed to visit the stopover country (i.e. leave the transit lounge/enter the country). the airline did not know about his new plans until it was near departure time when they found out that he hadn't boarded the plane. since he was a transit passenger, his luggage was obviously still on the plane. for safety reasons (in case the luggage contained some kind of explosive material), his luggage had to be identified and removed before the plane could depart. cabin and ground crew found one of his bags within half and hour but had to search the cabin and apron 3 times before they finally found second bag, hence the cause of the delay.

The delay made me rather fidgety as i had to make a connecting flight in london. my connection time was only 2 1/2 hours and i had to travel from terminal 4 to 1 and clear immigration on top of that. well, fortunately i managed to do all these in 45minutes as the airline had made special arrangements for all transit passengers. so... i managed to make my flight to glasgow..=) haha, but there was more trouble.. my luggage had not been loaded on the plane as the previous flight was delayed and there was insufficient time to load the bags. ...to cut the long story short, my luggage was to arrive on the next BA flight from london. this meant that i had to wait 1 1/2 hours at the airport for the next plane to arrive. haha.. fortunately for me, i had the company of kenneth, who was there to pick me up at the airport.

after picking up my bags, we took the shuttle bus to buchanan bus station before taking the subway to his place. payment for the bus rides are done on the bus with cash and the bus conductor issues the tickets on the spot. for train rides, all passengers are required to buy tickets at the control station and it costs a pound seventy for unlimited rides throughout the day. the trains are small and cramp.. i miss the mrt trains and my ez link card!! =P it was a short walk to ken's place from the train station but the rain was treated with much displeasure especially since i didn't have an umbrella and i had packed my detachable hood in my luggage bag..

ken's flatmate chris had his friends eugene and shuying over for 3 days. nice people.. they were on a uk tour together after eugene finished his exchange programme in wales.. he's currently studying in UIUC (university of illinois, urbana champaign) yep.. wow. shuying's graduated from nus.. arts student. anyway, after i got my stuff settled and my bags cleaned dry from all that rain, all 4 of us, eugene, shuying, ken and i went out together on this mini day tour of glasgow for which ken was the guide. we had fried mars bars, visited the german market fair (which was ending that day), walked around town, visited ken's uni (uni of glasgow), including the uni chapel (which was really beautiful).. in fact, the whole campus looks majestic. all pictures will be uploaded soon on my online photoalbum - http://sg.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/icymistral/my_photos
will leave my photos to do the talking.. just to add that the day was absolutely fantastic and i can't wait to see more of glasgow!

Family