Sara Hammerzmith

Well then, let me tell you all about these two days of traveling we’ve had before reaching our destination. So, we started the entire fucking day off, Saturday, by getting up an hour early. And why is this mentionable? This is mentionable, because I was like “I wanna sleep another hour… but there is no time..” and once we’d finished packing everything, that’s when I realize I had my phone on Swedish timezone, and not British, meaning we could easily have slept another hour… oh well. Despite this, we almost ran late. But not too late, only late for the bus to take us to the busstation, which on the other hand, was very early.

So we got to the busstation, got our tickets sorted out, got on the bus and then headed back towards London. It’s like.. a weird feeling in a way. You are looking out on the streets, and it’s not actually the same, but on the same time, it is. It’s just another bus on another high way, traveling between cities.

Once at Heathrow, we met up with Nathan who came all the way from Portsmouth to see us since he never made the show on Friday, so after a while, after quite the waiting, we managed to get a table at this coffeeshop where we had lunch together. He then stayed with us all the way up until it was time for us to go through security screening, and I shit you not, this was the hardest good bye I’ve ever done, at least in a very long time. Firstly, I don’t see him a lot, and secondly, I was actually really scared and nervous to do this trip to begin with, so I guess I found some comfort in Nathan being there.

So, once inside the gates we did some last minute shopping. We planned to stay awake the entire first flight, getting loads of candy, drinks and snacks to watch the Hunger Games trilogy, found this restaurant where we had dinner before it was time to board the plane.

Lucky me, I had scored a windowseat, so it was all good. After take off an other routines, we brought up my mac computer and started off with the first Hunger Games movie, when it happened.

The stewardessess came with food. And simply asked if we wanted dinner. And we were like yeah, sure, and the next thing I know is I find a foodplatter slammed on my mac. So basically, I’m having the most surprise dinner on top of my mac when watching The Hunger Games. Surreal feeling.

Sadly, the long traveling day had worn me out quite a bit, and I was getting very restless, so despite saying we’d stay awake, we decided to sleep off. I usually get sleepy from flights anyway, so perhaps it’d sort itself out anyway.

I woke up like, what, two hours or so before landing in China. I checked out the stuff they had on the airplane television, and we found Cycle 21 of Americas Next Top Model so we decided to watch that until the stewardess came with another batch of food, but this time breakfast. Like honestly. What did I need the Chinese money for if I was just gonna get food for free anyway?!

As we were approaching China and Guangzhou, I was breathless by the view, it was just… stunning.

Once at the airport, we did some quick hunting for food to eat – because I must admit, I was a bit stressed and rushed so I never got the chance to properly finish any of the meals, so we sat down and had one meal but first I picked up some gadgets in a tourist shop. It’s like, small porcelain figures on a string, I got two cats, one with stones and then this one with the turtle, which is now on my bag as my little mascot or token.

We boarded the next plane, and this one… Seriously. Like, first of all, the plane was far from full so we had the entire four seat row to ourselves. And it seemed, it was more space between the seats, so we could easily put our computer on top of the traytables to watch Catching Fire without having to have the computer in my lap. Even when the dude leaned the seat backwards, all we did was to move the computer a bit, and all was good.

After finishing that one, we tried to sleep again, and I woke up some time like… 4 am. I had a dream that we were landing, so I had hoped to see us being in Brisbane, but instead it was three hours till then. Damn damn damn. Tried to get back to sleep, but then at 6 they put on all the lights, brought us washcloths and breakfast so that was a no can do.

TO BE CONTINUED

// Sara

I’ll continue right now where I left off yesterday.

So, we got off the flight and then we had to wait almost an hour or so, or at least it felt like it, for our luggage. I started to freak out, I mean, I guess I’ve seen too many of these Australian Border Controls episode to be completely freaked out, but I guess I was a bit scared about getting in as well, but everything went smooth as fuck. So that’s good. And then we had to wait like I said, and it took ages. I was really worried for a while that it wasn’t gonna come, but eventually, it did, so that’s awesome.

We got ourselves a little freshed up in the bathroom before going out to meet my best friends. A guy that I have known for almost ten years, but had yet to meet. It was superodd to see him in real life, you know, a person I talk to almost daily but never see. Jesus. It was long overdue. He had Dave with him, a friend of his that I got to know during Eurovisions last year, so it was great seeing him as well.

So, we got to the car and the thing is, Dave has a very little car. It was a bit of a deja vu from last year when going on our tour, where the company at the time also had a small car. Difference is I had one bag, now we had like, four suitcase and three other bags. But, Dave is the man so he managed to get everything in. Good riddance.

We got home to the apartment, landed, I took my time well in the shower to get off like everything from the shows, seriously, men’s sweat all over from the pits, and then the flights… it was good. Then we waited for Curt to come back from his dentist appointment, or actually, we had planned to go see Chiara, but just as we were about to go, Curt came home, so he came with us.

We went to the store she’s working at, and it was soo good to see her in real life too! We didn’t stay for long obviously, not to disturb her too much at work, and we went to get snacks and then went home to pass out on the couch to Family Guy.

Chiara came home to do a turn, headed to her pole practice (I think?) and I went for a “walk”, basically going around the house since, apparently, it does go pitch black here already at 19. That is superweird. Right before I left we ordered pizza, and I had the best timing ever since I came home right when the pizza came.

So we had dinner, Curt went to bed and Chiara, me and Michelle sat up for a good few hours talking about concerts, music, traveling, work, horses well, life in general I guess.

Really good first day, I’d say.

// Sara

So wow. The first day on our big bonanza trip and it started rather…. Odd I’d dare to say.

Seriously, everything was done and fixed – just putting in the last few things when my mother notices that my dear EPIC Wildlife Crate Zebra is broken. The zipper got a runner, so… what was a well planned morning turned into a stressed morning. We decided after a few ifs and buts that we’d get a new suitcase, since none of the ones we had were big enough for the trip.

Once downtown, I was first heading to take out my exchanged money. And this also, turned out to be quite the ride. When I got there, they told me the order had disappeared from their systems somehow, but miracoulosuly, they had exactly the amount and currency I needed. So after a few stressful moments I got my money. And as Shania Twain put it, it can only go up from here, right?

Next up, was bag chase. At first I wanted to get another Epic Crate Wildlife, the black / white lepard one, but of course it was unavailable everywhere, so we got a turquoise Samsonite instead. Finally we got a bag, and then we repacked the entire thing in the parkinglot.

Headed over to Bergvik to meet up with Michelle and our driver Linda to begin the roadtrip down to Gothenburg and Landvetter airport, which was fun, but not very eventful. We got to Landvetter, checked in our stuff, had a quick dinner at Espresso House and were still close to almost missing the flight, because apparently they did final call already like 20 minutes ahead of time. Luckily, we hadn’t gone far from our gate.

Flight went on good, and landed twenty minutes ahead of time, and the passport check and baggage claim went so quickly and smoothly that even managed to get on the early bus to Norwich, walked all the way to the hotel, dumped our stuff and went out to get pizza, because lucky us, there was a pizzeria open at 3 am in the morning. So now it’s pizza and Bloodbound.

I guess you could say Shania Twain was right. It could only go up from here.

// Sara