You'll have to pardon mz spelling. This damned ENGLISH keyboard has the letters in all the wrong places. It took me 5 months to get used to the German keyboards, and now someone goes and SWITCHES things back. The y and z are the worst. I tried to visit Sarah's diary this morning, and ended up typing in grazbeal.diarzland.com Hmm. Not easy.

Add to that, Karen is using a mutated Mac keyboard in which the keys are actually compressed together so you would have to have the hands of an elf to fit them on the keyboard.

So, with that prelude out of the way...

Merry Olde England

I made it to London in one piece. I sat most of the flight *in my very uncomfortable* EasyJet seat, thinking how amazing it was that I was just sitting at our kitchen table in Baden, Switzerland, talking to a girl from China and one from Spain, and then in a few short hours I would be in LONDON with people from America. I had a citizen-of-the-world-moment

Let's see, coming in through customs was terrible. It was the worst passage I've had yet. For instance, all the EU/EEU/Brits could go through one door. But everyone else had to go through the other. Now, in Switzerland, we have 3 doors: 1 for Swiss, 1 for EU/EEU/U.S./Canada, 1 for others. The first two move really fast. If I were Swiss I would insist on a referendum to eliminate the EU door at their airports - it seems the courtesy is not being returned. So half the flight got stuck in this really long line, as their was only one customs officer there. And EACH person got a grilling that included normal questions like: Where are you going? Who are you staying with? How long are you going to be here? BUT they also got completely unanswerable questions that included: How do we know you are staying with that person or at that hotel? Do you have any proof? Have you been in England recently? (yes, in May, sir) Then WHY don't you have a stamp in your passport? (well, you'll notice my passport was stolen, AND, before Sept 11, you usually had to ASK them to stamp your passport or they wouldn't).

Anyway, the point is it took a really long time to get everyone through the line. I felt REALLY sorry for the older Indian couple that was traveling on our plane. Subject to horrendous racial profiling (I imagined, they suspected they could/possibly be Muslim and they were the only dark skinned people on the flight), their bags were searched twice at the Zurich airport, twice at the London airport, and their customs grilling lasted about 20 minutes (all inane questions).

At that, when my bag finally came off the conveyor, my Swiss Army Knife (which I had hastily placed on the top because you can no longer carry these in your purse out of fear that I could hijack the plane with the might of a 1 inch blade) and a box of chocolates I brought to the kind soul who Karen convinced to pick me up from the aiport had been "pilfered" from my bag. I guess that's the way things go, someone must've gotten a nice souvenir. What the nicest part of this whole thing was being able to explain IN ENGLISH what happened, in detail, and have the official party actually understand my words.

On Cranfield

Well, I haven-'t looked around too much yet, I plan to go wandering today. But I can report evrything that Karen says about it is true:

1. Its small

2. Its in the middle of nowhere (though you can see the bright lights of the "big city" of Milton Keynes in the distance)

3. There's EXREMELY satisfying general aviation noise flying past her house (I've always wanted to live in a fly-in community, and here Karen ends up at a fl-in university!)

I plan a very exciting day of relaxing here in the middle of nowhere, and eating the huge block of cheddar cheese Karen has in her fridge, and crashing the flight simulator a few times.