Settling In

Tuesday morning I was woken by my alarm, having slept nearly 12 hours. I got up, took my time figuring out the clothing situation, headed down to breakfast a little before 9.  I’d been told to come to school any time after 9:30 am to get my keys, so I ate a leisurely breakfast, mapped out where I was going online (ha. SO easy!) and headed out. My keys were quickly in-hand, as was info on how to access the building and use the network until the program starts. Sadly, my suitcase was not yet there. I told them to just email me when it came and set-back out for the hotel.

After gathering up my luggage and checking out, I walked to the dorm, headed in and up to the 2^nd floor (which is, in the tradition of most of the world, actually the 3^rd story), found my room and used my keys. Yay! I have a home!

I met Marita (super nice, from Canada, has been living in Germany for 6 years and lived in Japan for a year before that), made my bed and proceeded to unpack. Honestly, though, one of the best decisions I’ve made: to agree to buy my bedding from the dorm. Sheet, blanket, blanket cover, pillow and pillow case were all waiting for me. SO awesome.

Small problem: no internet. You have to fill in a paper, wait for a guy to come the next day to verify your MAC address and then wait until the following day for your connection to work. Oh. And: no wifi. No WIFI!! Somehow everyone in my group that I’ve met had the very, very clear expectation there would be wifi. No idea where we got that idea, but we have each been shocked in turn to discover it is not available.

More relevantly: no computer (wifi or otherwise) means no email, which means no idea when my suitcase arrives. Awwweeessssommme. So after I’d unpacked what I had, Marita and I went to the small shopping area and did groceries, then came back, then we went to the school to see if my suitcase was in (no) and to do some internet.  Then she stayed and I came back, specifically to get to the dorm administration office during the 90 minute period.  Although I managed to get lost on the way, taking the paths, I did make it back in the relevant period and got the form for the internet.

Wednesday I stayed home most of the day, waiting for the computer guy to come. The one exception was when Marita came back around noon and said my suitcase had arrived! Yay! I tell you, it was getting dire and I was freaking out about not having any clothes! She agreed to stay close in case the guy came, and I went to school and grabbed my case. SUCH a relief. Brought it back, unpacked it, I have more clothes than I feared, which is nice. One thing missing, and hopefully in the box I mailed myself? My work-appropriate shoes. Which I need on Tuesday. So I guess I’m going shoe shopping this weekend.

Computer guy showed around 3, did his thing in under 10 minutes, including chit chat, and I was finally free to leave … so I went to school and used the computers. Exciting, right? I actually stayed up late Tuesday, to see if the internet came on right at midnight. It hasn’t, sadly, so this will be posted tomorrow when I get up and have access. Which will hopefully be at the same time.  And then I will figure out how to get downtown Hanover and where to go shopping. Yay, plans! I also need to make some progress on a self-assessment for the career center, so that’ll basically be my day.

All and all, it’s been a stressful few days, but everything is smoothing out now and, hopefully, will stay that way. It is starting to sink in that I’m here for a long haul, I think. I’m having less and less trouble thinking of work as my former-work, and the people there as former co-workers. It still makes me a little teary, as it was a good time in my life, but … here’s to the future. Prost!

The Journey

By Sunday the 7^th, I had gotten down to the two big suitcases, one box to me (and one to RI), and a carry-on messenger bag. Great! So I repacked it all, and weighed. Interesting fact: up to 50 lbs of bags on the plane, it’s a bag, or an extra bag, depending. 51 – 70, it’s overweight and there’s a charge. 71? Not going. My first bag was 69.4. Woo! My second … errored out the digital luggage scale. At 9 am. With the airport run scheduled for 11. After an hour of weeding, I got it down to 76 lbs. God knows what it was before. Another hour … and I was under 70 lbs, barely, but then had to package up all the crap I’d just jettisoned to get it out of Deb’s house.

Oh. And during all this? Delta was contacting me, telling me, sequentially, my 1^st (of 3) flights was scheduled to be 90-ish minutes delayed in departing. So my JFK connection wouldn’t work. Fortunately for me, they re-booked me before they even told me, but the new layovers (5 hours in JFK, 4.5 in Amsterdam) pushed my arrival from Monday morning to Monday after business hours. This is an issue because I’m supposed to go to the school to pick up my keys to my dorm room.  Okay, no worries, this will be worked out, 1^st priority is the airport. And getting gone in enough time that Deb can get to the store and home again to prep for her lunch guests!

We got me to the airport by about 11:40, at a guess, plenty of time for a 1:29 flight and TONS of time for a 3:00 schedule delayed departure time! Went to check in, paid for and checked my bags just fine, but the system, which gave me no grief online the night before, balked at checking someone in for an international trip with a one way ticket and no visa. I don’t need a visa. I’m from the US. I can stay 2 months (or 6? Something like that) as a tourist with no need for additional documentation! Anyway. They did check me in, but only as far as Amsterdam. The last flight, from Amsterdam to Hanover, was on KLM … which was fine for JFK to Amsterdam, but apparently no farther? Okay. Fine. Whatever.

So I flew. The flights were largely unremarkable, other than my being so stressed that I had a tendency to start crying with little or no visible provocation. A nice text. A random thought … and the more tired I got, the more difficult it was to fight. So … it’s possible my seat-mates and other people in the gate waiting areas thought I was nuts. Which, okay, maybe I was nuts.

I arrived at JFK, found out the difference between gate 26 and B26 (oh, hell yes, there’s a HUGE difference), found the bus to terminal 4, the international terminal. Man. There are some cool airlines that fly in there, that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Pretty cool.  And I settled in to wait. And wait. And wait.

I did, once my gate opened (about an hour before the flight) see if they could check me into the KLM flight, since the other Delta people told me this was a KLM flight I was boarding. Yup, KLM, but Delta staff & computer, and the two computer systems don’t talk until 3 hours before scheduled departure. Which … is awesome. My bags could go no problem, they were tagged all the way through, just not me!

And I flew again. I’m  reasonably sure I didn’t sleep on either of the 1^st two flights, beyond about an hour on the 2^nd one. I did watch two movies, try not to cry and read. So productive!

Landed in Amsterdam. Following the recorded instructions, I went to a transfer kiosk to check-in … and it couldn’t find me, so I was directed to the transfer desk (which was about a half mile away, but whatever, it’s an airport). Finally, finally, finally they were able to check me in, and off I went to passport control.

As a general rule, I don’t have any problems at passport control. My last time through London I got grilled, but other than that it’s 2 questions and a stamp.  This was exactly the same. Delta had me all worried!

Okay, it was the same until I went through there and had to go back through security with my messenger bag and my 3’ cardboard tube (which I miraculously managed to not lose. I can’t count how many times I left it and had to go back for it, but people literally didn’t see it. Ever. Scary?). My bag was so densely packed it was hand searched (and the guy was super puzzled by my tampons. I have no idea.) and THEN I was screened again, where they wanted to open the metal things with my jewelry in it and make sure I’m not planning to sell it. They also asked “what’s in the cardboard tube” … but I waved it around and said  it’s a poster, and no one even took it to hold! Totally bizarre.

The extra search was actually nice, though, since it gave me an opportunity to re-pack my bag. It was way better organized afterwards.

And then I was through security and wandering toward my gate. Which was another bus-gate, though this time it was a flight specific  bus, so you had to be there when they were ready to drive you to the plane. I’ve actually done that before, in China, but there they drove for, like, 15 minutes, maybe more, all the way to what I suspected was the original Shanghai airport. Or at least the previous, if not ‘original’.

Anyway. I settled in to wait, checked my email and discovered I would not be able to pick-up my keys. So I booked a hotel. About 5 minutes later my suite-mate, Marita, as yet un-met, got back to me saying sure, she’d absolutely pick-up my keys for me, but the reservation was non-refundable, so I called it good and moved on with my life. Looking back, actually, that was a super expensive few days, between the shipping and the over-weight bags and the hotel!

Right. Amsterdam. Took the bus to the plane, boarded, read for about a minute and passed out. Which is good since on the bus ride I’d been feeling woozy and thinking I might just fall over. I didn’t sleep long … but I missed the end of the boarding, the safety instructions and most of the taxi for takeoff.  I only woke-up because my Kindle fell off my knee. Still, that 30 minutes or so was awesome, the flight was less than an hour and Bam! I was in Hanover!!

I love arriving from a Shengen-zone country. There’s nothing. No passport check, no customs, nada. Fun! Went to the luggage place. My first bag came really quickly. Then there was an announcement in German and everyone left, about half the plane, mobbed the desk. Apparently literally half the bags didn’t get loaded? Is that a thing? So we all filled out forms for our bags to be delivered.

On the one hand, having one of the two bags would make getting a taxi / getting to the hotel, the school and the dorm much easier. On the other … that’s half my stuff for an entire year! Eek! Even more fun: when I got to the hotel, checked-in and looked, it wasn’t the bag with my underwear. AWESOME.

Regardless. I was in Hanover in one piece, with a place to shower, sleep and an included meal in the morning. In other words, I was in heaven and I’d arrived.