getting here...finally

One of those journeys where your anticipation about getting there rages out of control as you are thwarted by a never-ending series of hold-ups…fighting through rush hour London, we ended up shuffling forward in queues all the way to our seats on the plane. Then 13 hours in the sky of (seemingly) waiting for the trolley to get past so that we could go to the loo.

I’m really bad at waiting. My adrenalin rises and I can feel it sloshing uselessly around in my blood. My brain whirrs trying to find ways around the obstacle. I get cross and stressed and sometimes cry. The lovely A is able to take things as they come. She’s missed loads of planes and what’s the worst that can happen? But I don’t want to miss this one so I’m already stamping my feet and almost galloping up the road to the station when we leave the house half an hour later than planned.

One of the aims of this trip is to find a way around that. Ease off, take it as it comes. Let the adrenalin burn off, look out of the window, distract myself with the immediate, something. There's no point fretting about something you can't change, a concept that I understand logically but which is very difficult to implement practically if you're hard-wired as I am.

And then just as we get to landing time, the pilot announces that due to the radar not working at Sao Paulo airport, we would have to fly round in circles for a bit “but don’t worry, we’ve got enough fuel”. Horrid thoughts of lots of uncoordinated, undirected planes buzzing round Sao Paulo airport like drunk flies, dropping out of the sky as their petrol runs out.

So we arrive having kept Juliana waiting nearly three hours, and queue to stamp our passport, and queue to get through customs and endure a baggage hall that resembles a giant lucky dip. But she’s there and after two years of course she's the same as I remember her and we’re so pleased to see each other and we have one of those lovely meeting-at-the-airport arrivals moments.

And then we step out of the airport and we’re greeted by the rain, which hammers down from a hot black sky but which feels joyous after a whole day spent squashed against other people in various metal tubes. And we zoom through the night in a steamy car, re-knitting together the threads of our friendship.

The ring-road in Sao Paulo is called the marginal, which is also the Portuguese word for a criminal. It's half midnight and Sao Paulo is silent, nobody on the wide streets as we swing through them to where Ju lives in a suburb called Lapa.

Falling asleep in a strange bed approximately 5875 miles away from my own little flat, it feels strangely like home because I know Juliana is upstairs, like she used to be, and I have the odd sensation of not having gone anywhere at all.