23rd July 198..
Today’s the day. Austria here I come. Up bright and early to travel to Leeds in the car to catch the train which was dead on time!! I sat next to a girl whi didn’t speak, and opposite an Austrian and her friend and they didn’t speak. In London we went by tube (just managing to get past the ticket collector) to a hotel done like one in the Wild West where we met more people and had horrible breaded fish and chips a Northerner in the South and ice cream. Then we got a train to Gatwick (we left our luggage in London) that’s a bit worrying. I talked to a boy a knew by sight from the Grammar School who had a horn with him car horn? French horn? bull’s horn? I sat next to the Austrian girl on the plane presumably in further silence and the flight didn’t bother me at all and was a bit boring. A bus took us from plane to airport, I found my suitcase after a long wait, then on a coach to Graz with a very pleasant girl chatty presumably and a funny Austrian student to talk to. I met Gunter my exchange partner who had already stayed with me, and whom I didn’t like very much as we had nothing in common and only his mother in Graz at 9pm-ish. Their house is marvellous it was.
