The flight landed London Heathrow airport at 7am local time (4pm Sydney time). The transfer for my connection flight from London to Madrid was nothing smooth. Firstly I heard them saying "passengers who will continue travelling to other part of Europe, please go to terminal 4 on your right, for all other passengers please go to terminals 1 to 3 right ahead." I was quite certain that Spain was part of Europe, then I went to terminal 4 and went through all the queuing for security checks only found that my flight information was not listed on the screen. I walked a long distance to speak to the information desk, was told my flight actually was supposed to take off from terminal 1. The lady said,"You'd better hurry, if you don't get there on time, they will leave without you.". When I first heard this, I looked at my watch and it was 7:45am, my flight was scheduled to take off at 8:20am. I thought there would be enough time for me to catch my flight even if I had come to the wrong terminal, but the lady wasn't so sure. She said, "yeah, you might", but the look on her face worried me a little.
After returning to the point where I joined the queue to terminal 4, I started realising why she wasn't certain about it. To go to terminal 1, I had to wait for a transfer bus along with many others, and once I got to terminal 1, there were like millions of people stuffed up waiting to proceed through. I challenged my patience by waiting in the queue for 5 minutes, and saw no hope that I would have got through by waiting in the queue, I started pushing through the crowd in front of me, apologising along the way, letting everyone know that I only had 15 minutes left before the plane took off and I didn't want to be left behind, blah blah blah... I started sweating when I got to a check point and was told I was once again at the wrong place, I hated the London Heathrow airport more than anywhere in the world. I thought I could read English, like many other people believe that I could, but all the complicating signs and information flying from everywhere just kept throwing me to the wrong places. I lost my pretended calmness and started to run at that point. When I eventually got to the boarding gate, I was nearly out of breath, it was 7 minutes to 8:20am. However I was told that the flight was delayed and there was no hurry for me to board the flight as there was no one having boarded yet. What a shit! Sorry about my Spanish.
The flight wasn't delayed for 10 minutes as they first told me, it was delayed for 1 hour and a half. The captain apologised for the delay, but his British humour didn't get to me and rather, made me really nervous. He said,” The plane we were supposed to fly this morning had some technical problems that I am not fully aware of, but as you know, when you are flying with British Airways, we always have a spare one at hand. So we pulled this one out of the wardrobe, cleaned it and prepared it...and on and on." The mentioning of pulling a plane out of a wardrobe and cleaning it only meant to me that the plane was an old craft and was never touched for a long time. I was worried that the 'newly-out-of-wardrobe' aircraft would throw us off from the sky at some point, and my worry went more serious when we had encountered a bad turbulence while we were already in the territory of Spain. Nothing terrible happened, otherwise I would not be sitting here typing it all out, but the landing was a dramatic shake as well, although I always say I don't fear death, I didn't want to die right there in that poor old plane after travelling all the way from Australia. At least I should see some of Madrid first, right?