Tuesday 31 August 2010

South Korea: Most exciting airline food ever

12 or so hours into my journey to Fiji!

Our plane took off at 7:50pm and so we had a Korean dinner - Bibimbap! Possibly the only airline food where you get instructions on how to make it first. So exciting!!


Rice, veggies, sauce, sesame oil all come separately and you mix them together to taste.
Hot sauce in a tube!


Seawood soup, pickles and carrot cake too!

Me, Jamie and Micheal are waiting in Seoul Incheon (with free internet, yay!) for a few hours before getting our connecting flight to Nadi in Fiji. There's a humid mist all here in South Korea but the airport is very lovely and it's nice to be able to walk around after 10 hours sitting in a plane. Planning to avoid jetlag by sleeping on the next 10 hour flight since we'll be arriving in Fiji around 8am and hoping it works!

Feels a bit strange and unreal, I don't really feel like I'm in another country yet. So far, so good. Hope we have a good journey to Fiji - see you there!

Monday 30 August 2010

UK: Packing... packing.... packed!

Right, so in 6 hours I will be on a plane on a flight to Fiji (but with a stop off in South Korea).

Packing took a lot longer than I expected so it's lucky I packed a week early! My bag's just a erm, a little bit heavy.... but nothing seems that bad once you've done Duke of Edinburgh and have carried a 17kg bag for 4 days over 100km! I went on a 30 minute trek around the fields near my house just to check my bag (and my back!) would keep it together and I'm glad to report a success! I did get some funny looks carrying 3months worth of Fiji stuff around a little town.

Most of the weight of my bag is made up of the 40 children's books I'm bringing over to help build the library at Viro Primary school. They're a mixture of my own, some kind donations from my Aunt's library in London and an atlas and map which I bought. I'm also bringing over as many school supplies as I can carry so I've got 50 pencils, 2 packs of rubbers, a pack of rulers and some posters (multiplication and number charts) which I've bought with the money which was kindly donated to me.



The Wokingham libraries have also been extremely kind and donated a whole bundle of resources including stickers, posters, certificates, medals and reaaaallly cool colour changing pens(!) to use to try and run a reading challenge to encourage reading!

And then.... after all that found its way into my bag I've packed a week's worth of clothes (since I'll be able to do washing), lots and lots of medication from my mother, a diary, sketchbook, watercolour palette, letter writing materials, my own stationary, duct tape and.... well enough other stuff to (almost) fill a 60L rucksac!

I've also packed my international Guiding uniform, a book with lots of ideas on cooperative games to play, a ball and some rope so that I can join in with any Guiding activities and hopefully teach some games and songs from Europe. I've been in touch with the Guiding HQ in Fiji and they've kindly invited me to the Centenary Celebration of Guiding in Levuka this October! I'm really excited since I didn't make it to the Centenary Camp in England since I was saving money for my gap year and I really don't think I could be celebrating 100 years of Guiding anywhere more exciting than Fiji!

I also spent this last week making a little scrap book about my life with lots of pictures of Wokingham, my school and my work so I can show people a little about life in England! I'm guessing the market town of Wokingham is going to more than foreign compared to the traditional Fijian bure.

With all that crammed in my bag I hope I haven't forgotten anything!!! I will be seeing if I can set up a poste restante so if I have ended up leaving something seriously vital that I can't get in Fiji I can get it posted out (and maybe get some snail mail from my friends!).