Greetings, readers, and welcome to what I hope will be a riveting account of my British excursion, as told by someone with a peculiar penchant for all things British who has never ventured beyond the North American continent and has more or less never done anything without the comfort of his family or friends. If this isn't the ultimate fish out of water tale, then I don't know what is.
After a 9 and a half hour flight on Air New Zealand from Los Angeles, during which I watched about seven episodes of The Big Bang Theory, an episode of Downton Abbey, and movies such as Young Frankenstein and Crazy Stupid Love, all while occasionally dozing off as much as the intermittent rumblings of mild turbulence would allow me to, I arrived on the soil of Her Majesty's realms and territories. Arriving at Heathrow Airport under a blanket of gray clouds and the shimmer of damp concrete definitely made me realize I wasn't in Kansas anymore (or California, if we're getting technical here); considering I had just left a place where it was 80 degrees on Christmas Day.
After embarking on the endless journey from the arrival gate to Immigration, a weird sensation of giddiness and terror overcame me. I was in Great Britain! A country I have dreamed my entire life of visiting, a country I know far too much about politically, culturally, musically (look at my iTunes - 75% of the music on there is by some British pop singer). I was actually walking on English soil. At the same time, a little voice inside my head was panicking over the daunting odyssey that lay before me - I have never spent more than a couple of weeks away from the temperate climate of my manicured, suburban Southern California hometown, and here I was about to embark on a five-month excursion on the other side of the globe from it. What the hell am I doing? I have no idea what I got myself into, I asked myself about five or six times during that walk through the airport.
And then there was the moment of truth, as I called it - passing through immigration. For some reason, I had a strange fear that there would be some issue with my admission into the UK and I would be promptly dispatched on the next flight back home, altogether having spent maybe an hour or two at most on British territory. The woman at the counter checked my passport, then asked to see my return ticket (gulp...I haven't booked my plane ride back home yet and I didn't know I had to do it being as it was still five months away), then reviewed the documents I provided from the university I was attending as well as documents proving I had the finances to fund my studies and residency there. After a few minutes of receiving quizzical glances from the immigration clerk (I don't know what her official title is, so my apologies in advance if that sounded condescending in any way), she stamped my passport and bid me welcome to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Phew.
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