You alright?
From the very first moment that you step inside the United Kingdom, this will be the most heard two words for you. I am not even kidding, and after a point of time — you will be so tired of hearing it and having to answer back with a ‘yes’ when actually you are crying inside with ‘no I am not, I need a coffee, a hug, a 100 million dollars’ and the list goes on and that is probably why you are still reading this right now.
I am Chaitali, an international student all set to make it big in her city of dreams. I currently study global business management at the University of East Anglia in Norwich where I am also the international student ambassador.
But that is not where all this begins, it all started with an essay in my assessment workbook back in class 3 where we had to write about our dream destination — but with a twist as to how fussy the situation got before we got there. Thank god for my English teacher back then, both the essay and the scarring memory of my first ever international flight to London’s Heathrow airport will be etched in my heart forever.
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With several zillion butterflies in my stomach, when I waved and hugged goodbye to my closest friends who had come to see me off at the Bengaluru International airport in India — little did I know that my steal deal connecting flight that I had booked and boasted of the deal on would turn out to be one of my worst nightmares. Only a few moments after the security check, I was greeted by the news of a 2 hour delay in the flight but somehow I managed to overlook the same because I could barely wait to wake up in London. Good thing, airports are sometimes really rewarding — while I was queued up with several others for a significant amount of time, the extrovert in me couldn’t help but befriend all those around me. First, I remember taking a photograph (secretly) of this gentleman’s luggage who stood right in front of me — a fancy but tiny cabin Carlton in prussian blue, 2 other super family sized trolley bags, a leather bag pack, badminton rackets and more, I sent this photo to my friends group over whatsapp captioned ‘this guy has more luggage than I do, lol’. You do not have to slam the door at me for stereotyping, standing for countless hours in the queue leaves not much for you to do and you take to clicking pictures of other’s luggages. Okay, I see what you feel is wrong but wait. Next, it was this girl right behind me and she had the exact same red polycarbonate trolley bag I had bought only 2 days ago to pack for the United Kingdom itself. Because my friends knew, one of them asked me where my other new trolley bag was because he did not see it in her luggage ofcourse. I explained how I had found my trolley bag twin! The only other person I remember from that day was another international student whose final destination was not London but Aberdeen, so we had to let him go.
While we were already on a two hour delay, feeble announcements made us aware of another 2 hours of delay in the flight. By this time, it had become a little concerning for all of us because our connecting flight was from Abu Dhabi and we had a tiny window to be able to board it. I reassured myself that since the connecting flight too was the same airlines, they would make some arrangements for us because there were definitely more than 10 passengers taking the same flight from Abu Dhabi to Heathrow.
Nonetheless, I grabbed a java chip frappucino with my standard less ice customisation using my starbucks gold card rewards for that one last time in India and sat down calming myself that this is all going to be a distant memory once I am on board. Alas, life had other plans. But thankfully, after a significant 5 hour delay, we finally took of from the Bengaluru airport. Archit, Prisha, Jordan and I were all distantly seated so we could not really express our joys of being able to finally fly but I am sure we were all on the same boat or shall I say the Boeing 787 jet?
The cabin lights dimmed, I fastened my seatbelt and fell asleep as we began our journey in a bit but from there it went up, up and oops!
