Not Taken.

... well at the moment anyway. In other words, I arrived safely in London and made it to my hotel without incident. Well unless you count the fact that I didn't realise it's a bank holiday here today and therefore I had to pay public holiday rates for my taxi from the airport - ouch. I know I could have caught the train instead but I've previously had pretty bad experiences dragging around luggage in overly crowded stations - and that was with Husband there to do most of the heavy lifting!

When I arrived at my hotel my room wasn't ready yet, so I left my luggage there and wandered up the street to the British Museum to kill time. It was even better than I was expecting. The building is awesome and the exhibits are very detailed and interesting. My lack of sleep during the flights did start to hit me though about halfway through and I stopped paying attention and taking photos. I may have to go back another day.

I did take my own photos of the museum but the people taking photos for the British Museum website obviously did a much better job!

In other news, I have an update from my last post where I said I had no researchers to meet with. I am now meeting one tomorrow morning and another the next day, and I have another person I'm supposed to call soon too! Aargh. I'm really not great at talking to strangers anyway, but I'm sure this will be worse considering they're extremely smart and important and I'm trying to convince them they should hire me. So after getting back from the museum I had a nap and then went back to studying for my meetings (I hope there won't be a test!).

It also turns out a couple of my friends will be in London as well in the next few days, so things have worked out quite nicely in that regard. I also really like the suburb I'm staying in. So overall, if I pretend I don't have scary meetings coming up I can say so far so good and I'm looking forward to the rest of the week!

Countdown

My flight to the UK is on Sunday. I can't believe just how quickly it has come around. As mentioned earlier, I'll be in London for a week and then I'm heading north to Bangor in Wales for my neuro course. I was supposed to be meeting with academics while in London to discuss potential jobs, but unfortunately it doesn't look like that will happen. Either people are still away (since it's uni summer holidays over there) or they do not have any money to hire anyone right now. One person said they'd be happy to meet, but when I tried to get them to set a specific date they never got back to me. Helpful. So instead for that week in London I'll just try to work on my thesis. 

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A few people have said I should just enjoy my time there and not think about writing at all. I don't think I can do that entirely however. A friend of mine will be in London for some of that time so I'll make sure to have some fun... though I'll probably enjoy myself more if I've done a fair bit of work and therefore don't have to feel guilty about getting further behind (my self-imposed schedule).

On a sort-of-related-note, here's a movie not to watch just before you travel alone overseas: Taken. I was so focused on worrying about the flights that I forgot all about the possibility of being kidnapped and forced into trafficking. However I will say I am not as stupid as the girls in the movie to tell complete strangers where they'll be staying alone. Goobers. It's a good movie though - I'm sure husband would have enjoyed it more if I didn't spend the whole time going "Oh NO! What if I get TAKEN!" 

He did say he'd come get me though, so that's nice.

Booked.

Plane tickets and accommodation for my trip to the UK have been sorted! I'll be in London for about a week, and then heading up to Bangor in Wales for my neuroanatomy course. I'm supposed to be organising to meet with academics from different universities for while I'm in London, however it has been quite difficult to pin people down to agree to meet with me. It is a bit hard to get a job if I can't actually talk to anyone! I still have several weeks to go though so hopefully it will get sorted. If not I will have a fair bit of time on my hands in London. Unfortunately I will probably be a bit boring and use the time to work on writing my thesis. At least I've been to London twice before so I've seen many of the attractions already. Also from what the travel agent told me yesterday, even though the olympics will be over by the time I get there a lot of the visitors will still be around so the city will still be super packed. All the more reason to avoid the really popular places! I'm sure I'll find some cool places to write though, and definitely do not plan to be cooped up in the hotel the whole time.

While I do mean to mostly write while there, the place I've booked to stay at is right near the British Museum which I haven't visited before, and I am considering one of those big day tours (if they're not all booked out).There's one that goes to the Cotswolds which looks pretty amazing.

[from here]

Then of course there's the train trip up to Bangor (which is pretty northern) so I'll get a good chance to see the countryside then as well. I'm also very nerdishly excited about the neuroanatomy stuff too. 

So here I am again, thinking of the UK instead of focusing on my thesis... oops.

Exciting News!

Well, for me anyway. I'm not sure how exciting you'll find this information, but it's my blog and I'll say what I want to hehe. It's also not so news-y for people who also follow me on twitter since I've already mentioned it there. But oh well. By the way, before I go any further I'd like to state NO I'm not pregnant.

Since I got back from New York earlier this year, I've been thinking it would be cool to go on a longer trip to the US, as New York is the only place I've been there, and Husband hasn't been at all. However it didn't seem like it would happen any time soon. Then yesterday morning I had a dream I was organising going and talking about which places to visit. When I woke up (at 4am mind you) I was very sad to find out it wasn't real. As Husband was getting up for work at the time (poor him) I sleepily asked him if we could go next year and to my surprise he said yes! So of course this meant it was extremely difficult to get back to sleep because I started calculating in my head how much money we'd need and could save, and my list of places we could go. I finally got back to sleep a bit after 7am. When I got up again a bit later, of course I wasn't really able to get much work done. I did however make an excel spreadsheet of the order of places I wanted to go to, and how many days at each place (yes, I know how nerdy this sounds).

"I want to go to there". [map from here]

Poor Husband when he got home from work got bombarded with all my plans. When I'm really excited about something I do seem to go a bit overboard and start organising right away (if only that excitement would return about uni work!). I've very begrudgingly nicely conceded however that he is welcome to think this through for himself and change my plans accordingly, since it's his trip too!

As it stands however we'll probably be going mid September next year, for nearly two months, getting back in time for Husband's brother's wedding in November. There is one potential glitch in this plan however - which is when will I be submitting my PhD thesis? I'm hoping that having a definite deadline of when I'm leaving the country will help me to actually finish up by then. As the time gets closer, I'll have to re-evaluate how likely this is. 

For now though, I should probably stop imagining all the places we might go, and get back to uni work, or maybe I won't be finished in time! I will post later on where we plan to go once Husband agrees with me helps decide our itinerary :P

Fear of Flying - Part 3: Why You'll Be OK

After a bit of a break from this series (I have a good excuse, honest!), I've finally come back to it. Today I want to cover dealing with not being in control on the flight.

Firstly, I'm not always the most trusting of people, so I've in the past been a bit suspicious of allowing other people to be in control of my safety. What if the people who build and maintain the planes are lazy, or what if the pilots are dodgy? Well I looked into this and here's what I found...

Hello from New York!

I have arrived safely, you'll be happy to know. Flights were fine (will update another post on fear of flying when I get the chance), though had zero sleep. Also had to rush at LAX to get through customs for my connecting flight - made it just in time!

So I got in to JFK airport yesterday evening and caught a taxi to my hotel on 5th ave (love that the uni is paying for this). The taxi driver was interesting, asked lots of questions about Australia and asked to see Australian money. "This is Queen Elizabeth right?" (looking at $5), "yes that's right", "you guys still follow him?", "err, yes?".

I had a quick look around near my hotel last night, in search of food. Since I was super tired I settled with Wendy's (as far as I know, there aren't any Wendy's in Aus, or at least Sydney). The guy was very confused when I asked for chips, "you want... juice?". Haha I have to remember the American words for things. Also they were shooting a TV show outside as well. I overheard the following conversation between a girl passing by and a guy from the film crew:

Girl: "What you guys filming?"

Guy: "TV show called White Collar"

Girl: "Anyone important in it?"

Guy: "Not really". 

Hehe. So not an overly exciting first night for me, as after that I went back to the hotel and watched NCIS to drown out all the cars beeping until I fell asleep (it was a DiNozzo marathon yay). Today I am catching up with a uni friend who has also come over for the conference. I am supposed to meet her near Times Square, so I guess I should work out where that is!

Feel free to give me some suggestions of where I should go while I'm here :)

P.S. Now I get to cross #11 off my 30 before 30 list. YAY!

Fear of Flying - Part 2: Causes

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Why are some people afraid of flying whereas others have no problem with it? For me personally, I had a particularly turbulent flight once and quite a few people on the plane were visibly and audibly concerned (including myself and the friend I was sitting next to). However it can be for a whole host of reasons.

Sometimes it is a bi-product of having another anxiety problem, such as claustrophobia (fear of enclosed spaces), acrophobia (fear of heights), or agoraphobia (fear of panic attacks in public). In these cases it's not flying in particular that is the issue, but more that being in a plane brings up these other problems. These issues would need to be tackled first, and then you might find that flying isn't so bothersome after that. As such it is probably outside the scope (at the moment) for me to talk about these in great length. Generally though, being a bit nervous about flying isn't a problem, but it's when it starts to interfere with your life (e.g. passing up on a job promotion because it would require frequent air travel, or not going to a loved one's wedding due to flying) that you know that you might need to do something about it. Here are some common reasons why people are afraid of flying...

Fear of Flying - Part 1: Introduction

If you know me, or read this blog even semi-regularly, you'll know that I'm going to New York on Friday. The question I've inevitably been getting for the past couple of weeks has been: are you excited? 

[source]

I get to look at some famous landmarks, do tonnes of shopping, and meet some of my academic idols at the conference I'm going to - but honestly, the answer is NO. I'm not excited. In fact, I'm kind of dreading it. Once I'm over there I know it will be great, but it's the getting there (and back) that is the problem. It takes nearly an entire day on the plane to get from Sydney to NY (including a brief stop at LAX). Based on previous experiences I know I won't be sleeping much, or even reading or watching movies to distract myself. I'll be staring out the window and also carefully watching the flight attendant's faces for any signs of disaster (and constantly praying nothing bad happens)!

This might come as a bit of a surprise, considering I study psychology, and I know for a fact that this is an irrational fear. I have actually flown quite a few times - especially recently when Husband and I went to Europe for our honeymoon. Obviously, we were totally fine, and I actually did sleep a bit on the flight home through turbulence. However Husband was there the whole time so I could also check his face to see if he was worried, and he wasn't. This time, I'm totally by myself, and there is nobody to tell me I'm being irrational. Although I will tell myself that I'm sure (many times), I'm not very good at listening to myself!

So for my own preparation I'm writing a couple of posts (it was only going to be one but then I realised how much there is to cover) about why this is irrational and why I will almost definitely be fine. Hopefully if there are some people out there that have similar concerns I can help you a bit too. If you don't have problems flying, well either feel free to skip these posts, or keep reading so you can understand a bit more about the people who do, or just a bit more about fears and phobias in general.

Stay tuned...