After my whirlwind two weeks at home I have returned to the relative calm of Ottawa. The Christmas break has been hectic to say the least. In the past two weeks I have celebrated three different this Christmas, New Year and my 20th birthday. For New Year I celebrated at the Glasgow Street Party with my boyfriend, we got to see some great new Scottish bands and fireworks when the clock struck midnight. My birthday was a somewhat less extravagant affair where I just spent the day hanging out with my family before we all had dinner together and I got cake and presents!
Aside from the parties I spent my two holiday weeks catching up with friends from both school and university, chilling with my sisters but admittedly spent most of my time hanging out with my boyfriend and showing him around my home town of Glasgow. All this excitement mixed with two trans-Atlantic flights has left me exhausted.
Of course after my crazy run-in with fog and delays on the way out to the UK before Christmas I was hoping that my flights home would be allot less stressful. Despite the 5am check-in time and the 7 hour lay-over in Heathrow airport, which is probably the worst airport ever conceived, all went according to plan and I found myself sailing through customs and standing at the baggage claim area where my rucksack would soon appear and I waited. Then I waited some more and some more until finally my flight number disappeared from the board and my heart sank. My bag wasn’t there- bad news. I dragged myself over to the enquiry desk and was informed that during the seven hours I spent in Heathrow, the airport hadn’t managed to move my bag from one plane to another and it had been left in London. So I filled out a sheaf of forms detailing my contact addressee and description of the bag and was told it would probably be delivered in a couple of days. After handing my forms to the customs officer I was allowed to leave the airport and tiredly stumbled into a taxi that would take me to campus.
Once I got to campus my need for food overtook my need for sleep and I went with my flatmate and a few friends to Oasis, the on campus diner for some much needed nourishment. It was really nice to hang out with people I had missed over the past two weeks and hear all about their holiday experiences from staying to rustic cabins in the woods, to taking a twenty-two hour train journey to Nova Scotia, to just heading an hour down the road to hang out with their family. At nine o’clock with food in my stomach I bid my friends goodnight and headed back to my room to crash, there was only one day to rest before classes began all over again.
