BONUS MATERIAL: THE EMAIL I SENT TO BRITTANY ABOUT MINE AND BENOIT’S JAUNT TO ENGLAND
BONUS MATERIAL: THE EMAIL I SENT TO BRITTANY ABOUT MINE AND BENOIT’S JAUNT TO ENGLAND
It’s a long one but I emailed Brittany a practical step-by-step of the moving process from the US to Germany (plus a trip to England to see family)
Tuesday, 19 November 2013, 12.26 am
Brittany,
It’s always difficult to write retrospectively. Obviously, everything one writes about life is retrospective, but the further the time from the event, the more difficult it is to recall details unless in those cases when distance from the situation is best. I shouldn’t approach (or not approach) writing in this manner; I should just give you a quick summation of my day as it occurs – even if nothing much does. If nothing else, when I look back on it, it’ll be more accurate to my feelings at the time, and it might brighten your day a little. Your daily emails always brightened mine.
I’ve been meaning to write to you for days, weeks, but, as you know, without social stimulus, I lack motivation. When I’d had the most “energy” to write, my time was taken up, unfortunately, but my goal is to write to you a line or two each day at least. I know this was one of your biggest concerns of my moving away; however, we do still talk each day – it’s just not in the “formal” email format. Also, I like my emails (or my one postcard so far) to be a surprise, and most days you’d ask me to write, so it didn’t motivate me to write…
I had put some dates and notes in my phone calendar, which seem to have been completely erased and are thus entirely useless in helping me recall events. I pieced together some of it through iPhone pictures, texts, and Facebook. It’s funny how much we remember and how much we forget isn’t it?
See, this whole self-documentarian thing has been going on a while.
I hope your grading is over and that you are relaxing by the time you get this message.
I pretty much spent the day uneventfully eating leftovers, too much chocolate, a can of Coke, lots of water, some hot chocolate, and watching 30 Rock for most of the day wearing the same clothes I’d worn the day before and the same clothes I had slept in too. [Benoit] got so upset and worried about me when my phone was dead and I hadn’t answered for a couple of hours that he drove home from his twenty-four hour staff duty (which he wasn’t supposed to do) to check that I was okay, and he was really upset and I felt he overreacted to the whole thing, but I guess he was worried (and I illegally combined too many elements of a sentence together). He did bring me some hot chocolate for the Keurig thingy that he bought, though, so that made my night more enjoyable. And it was nice to be able to give him a hug today even if it only was for a few minutes. Just for the record, 30 Rock is less fun without you.
A recap of some important and not-so-important events in the last few months:
Sunday, 15 September—Visit to Milledgeville
I’m glad I was able to squeeze in a visit to see where you live now and see you set up before I left. It is the first time we’ve lived in a different place in years now. I thought Milledgeville was charming if not small. Maybe one day I’ll come back and see Andalusia too. I am proud of you for doing as well as you are there. I know it’s not easy, but it’s also not forever. I hope you visit me soon too.
Tuesday, 17 September—[Padma, cute Indian housemate] and Ian [gay bestie in undergrad] and the day I become a U.S. Citizen
You really helped me pass this whole test process. I think I might be a bit of an audible learner too because I remembered the way you said things for those questions I was a little stuck on. It was a little scary doing this alone as silly as it sounds. I’ve never had to do government-related activities on my own without my mum or [Benoit] beside me, so even finding the hotel (with the help of the GPS of course) and getting to the room and preparing for the next day hoping I’d wake in time was a challenge. I found the building pretty easily the next day, and, like I told you, my interviewer was a character. I never expected my interviewer to be a perfectly human, very tall black lady with caramel-coloured hair and long, pink nails and a very “loud” outfit. I expected some unfriendly face in a nondescript dark suit, and robotic like questions and being drilled as if I was in an interrogation. For some reason, her defying my expectation helped me relax, and the process was pretty painless except the waiting. Waiting for anything is always hard. I also hoped that my change in marital status wouldn’t jeopardize my application—she had to go and ask questions—but in the end it didn’t since I wasn’t applying on the basis of marriage.
I came back later—after a nap and a rushed lunch at Jason’s Deli including ice cream (and I was even counting calories then, 13 lbs down from my record weight of [not relevant])—for my oath ceremony, which included a room full of about two hundred or so people from all over the world (literally, some countries I hadn’t heard of plus one person from Lebanon that I didn’t see) listening to patriotic music complete with a slide show of “Americans” dating from the first Irish and English boats to the present, the national anthem and the pledge, a repeated oath chanted by all in the room, a speech on the projection screens from President Obama, maybe about our new duties as citizens, some talk about the importance of changing our status in the social security office.
The subtle ways I was being ‘trained’ by Benoit. I’d gotten to the highest weight I’d been because, you know, new relationship, happiness, eating more, not working out six days per week, and I was being trained with subtle cues of how I was to behave, dress, act, and look.
The first thing they did, however, when they entered the room was snatch away our green cards. You know me and attachment. I was strangely attached to that little card. I didn’t want them to take it from me; it’s like we didn’t have enough time together. Then there was this bit where they called out every country represented in the room—in Alphabetical order—I thought it would never end and it felt like it took forever to get to U for the United Kingdom. That’s the trouble with England—there’s too many possibilities—England, Great Britain, the United Kingdom. I wasn’t sure which letter they’d choose. I liked the little flags we were given. That’s probably what all my money for the application went on. Little flags. Stapled to the mini wooden pole. Then I asked some people to take a photo of me with my certificate, and I was done.
I found Ian (who now goes by Lee to his Atlanta friends just as in high school he went by Adrian) later and hung out with him for a few hours. It’s always nice to see him. He seemed to have been doing a lot better than the last time I’d seen him. Back at GA Tech, new boyfriend, still in his fraternity, and so on. I stuck around quite a bit later to catch [Padma], my old Indian roommate, whom you met I think when she was in tears, all grown up and also doing well. It was nice to see her. That’s the good thing with old friends—you can pick up where you left off.
Sunday, 29 September—[Benoit’s new nephew] is born
I didn’t get to see the baby until later in the day, but he was precious and so small and I got to feed him. [Benoit] and I picked up some flowers that were planted in a teacup at the hospital gift shop, which was a pretty crappy gift shop and only a few balloon varieties to choose from. Inevitably, we picked a balloon that the baby had already received, but there were no other options. It’s amazing how [the glamorous former Miss Lebanon/TV presenter sister-in-law] can always look nice. Why do some people always look so together? [Benoit]’s sister is like it too. Those “together” pretty people. I have those moments when I look together-ish—my hair is never in place—but I try, and then I have those moments when it looks like I was hibernating in a cave. Take yesterday, for example, I woke up and [Benoit] mentioned that my hair was kinda sticking up all over the place because I’d left it in my side braid all night with hair clips in too. That plus my old, smeared makeup didn’t make me look together. Anyway, I digress. I just hope that I look okay after I have a baby, and that whilst I’m pregnant, I don’t gain a ton and still not have to eat only/mostly lettuce before, during, and after pregnancy like [glam sister-in-law]. I think I would get very tired of lettuce. I like hot food too. I don’t think I ever saw her eat chocolate once.
Monday, 30 September to Tuesday, 1 October—Saying Goodbye and Arriving in Germany
This day felt like one of the longest days every, mostly because it bled into the next day with very little sleep. I woke up earlier than I needed to because [Benoit] was so paranoid that I wouldn’t get ready in time that he woke me early and he didn’t expect that I’d promptly get dressed and ready, which then necessitated my waiting for things to get rolling. The older boys, [Benoit’s nephews], were building rockets (or something) out of cardboard boxes and tape. I still miss those boys. I think they [names] are some of the best-behaved children I know and I’m totally in love with their adorable-ness. [The middle nephew], I’ve been told, keeps my postcard in his dresser drawer – that’s where he hides precious things. I want to write to the boys again, but individually. And eventually, I’d like to send them pictures of themselves with [Benoit] and with me too. [The middle nephew] was very sad to say goodbye and he shed some tears, poor thing. [Benoit]’s poor mum cried too. [Benoit] was emotional, but didn’t outwardly show it.
[Benoit’s brother] helped bring the bags into the Louisville airport for check-in. They let us check all six bags. [Benoit] and I had a rushed—and cold—breakfast from Starbucks at the airport. They didn’t toast their bagels so I had an untoasted cinnamon bagel and it was very awful and made me sad as it was my last “American” meal for a while—unless I count the food I had in Baltimore, which I’ll tell you about in a second.
Food has always ruled my life and (this is rather sad) a bad meal can make me sad because food is delicious and can bring joy!
I don’t remember arriving in Charlotte really. I’ve been to that airport a few times. I think we may have gone via Charlotte to Chicago too. I quite like the airport there; it’s small and easy to navigate. We took that flight to Baltimore Airport.
Baltimore Airport, I learned, has two sides, the regular people domestic flights and the military flights side. The military airport bit is horrible and nothing like a real, normal airport. Apparently, once through security, there was nowhere to eat inside this bit of the airport so we ate at a really dingy sports bar café place and ate pub cuisine. The food tasted much better than the place looked. The appetizer quesadilla was really nice and I got fries and chicken fingers, which were okay too. Despite the fact that internal US flights let us check most of our bags with [Benoit]’s military orders, naturally, the flight to Germany—the military flight—would not so we had to carry a ridiculous amount of stuff as “carry on,” namely a small rolling suitcase, a giant overnight bag which sufficed as my “handbag” and laptop case, [Benoit]’s heavy backpack, our coats, and our garment bag containing our wedding outfits.
For my cousin Pam’s wedding.
The plane wasn’t what I expected either. My seat’s blanket wasn’t sealed so [Benoit] took someone else’s, which was probably not a nice thing to do. There was visible debris down the side of the plane and the plane looked old. There was one really bad projection screen not far from us, but in the middle of the plane and we were on the left side, and I’d never seen a plane so full of men who looked mostly alike. There was this one rowdy group sitting to our right who were just on a Europe backpacking trip because apparently you can do Space A flights where you fly for $25 if you can get a seat on the plane, so they were just excited. I was already tired by my third flight in and the long wait before boarding the plane itself. The flight felt longer than most flights I’ve taken to England—I know Germany is a little farther, but it seemed to take ages. The meal was worse than most airplane food too. The only thing I enjoyed was the cheese and crackers. I think I also got some sort of meat/vegetable combo, but I can’t recall. Three movies played: Jack and the Giant Slayer, Playing for Keeps, and The Avengers. I’d seen all, but Playing for Keeps, which I made a point of watching, the sound was quite scratchy, but I enjoyed watching the film. It was entertaining. I watched bits of Jack without sound and tried to sleep through Avengers because I’d seen it too.
Most airport composition seems to be businessmen, a few people who appear to be backpacking, fewer parents than you’d expect, and plenty of duty-free shops, restaurants, the obligatory massage places, and shoe shine stations, but military airports are the exact opposite. Filled with beardless, undifferentiated men with similar body compositions, and more children than you usually witness flying; it’s like not being in an airport at all.
On one of the small internal flights I think I slept the whole time, but on another there was this man who had this really irritating hacking cough. It was relentless, every few minutes or less, and this horrible snot-wrenching-phlegmmy-disgustingness. The sound made my skin crawl it was so disgusting. My throat involuntarily wretched each time I heard it and I’m pretty sure it lasted almost the entire flight. I’m thankful I could neither see this man or woman nor was I sitting next to him or her. [Benoit] said I shouldn’t be so disgusted because this person could have throat cancer. That made me feel a little bad for the person, but when this hack happened again, not so much. Then another flight—I think the one from Charlotte—there sat in front of us, this very large man—you don’t often see very large people on planes, and I felt sorry for him. [Benoit] made a comment—and like the cancer comment—I just said that it wasn’t nice to talk about him because maybe he was self-conscious of his size, especially because he probably got stared at a lot. I was right because at the end of the flight he made a sort of comment to the man who had sat with him about maybe he didn’t have to sit next to such a big guy on the next flight.
Already tit-for-tat and lacking compassion for each other. Michael and I may have this sort of exchange but always in joke format (Michael has an inability to be serious) but we’d both definitely agree hacking coughs are not cute and I cannot stand anything to do with the dreaded word ‘snot’ or variations thereof. Also, I’m not fat-phobic and as someone who has felt larger, I have sympathy for people as people who are overweight know they’re overweight. It’s not a surprise and often people are embarrassed about it/want to change it and it’s not easy to do that. Dieting is difficult and getting back in shape is difficult.
We arrived in Ramstein Airport and after waiting for ages, collected our luggage. Then we were ushered into another room to wait and [Benoit] went in a different room to fill out paperwork. Then we had to wait for ages in the customs line to go through the passport check to enter the country. And then we were ushered into yet another room and told the bus to Vilseck would take SIX hours. I was very upset. I was already exhausted from the long day, all the flights, the dehydration and everything that goes along with it, and I lost my patience and told [Benoit] I didn’t want to wait for the bus and that we had to take a train or do something to get there faster. [Benoit] made a point that we didn’t know where the train station was, how to read the schedule, buy a ticket or any of that. We went into a different area of the airport after that and found some reclining chair bed things and I tried to get some rest. We met a family trying to go back to the States for a visit who had been denied the Space A flights for quite a number of days. They had two or three children so I felt badly for them waiting for hours each day in an airport.
After waiting maybe another two hours, we got on the bus to Vilseck. [Benoit] and I loaded up our things in the trailer that was pulled behind the coach and we commandeered the back seat which we proceeded to lie down on at opposite ends and conk out until we arrived at some gas station for food where [Benoit]’s card didn’t work to withdraw funds—mine did eventually—but not before someone had loaned us some Euros for some baguette sandwiches. Mine had salami on it and a tomato and a single slice of egg. It was odd, but not unsatisfactory. I also got a couple of giant bottles of water. We met a couple of nice people on the bus, but I was more interested in sleeping at that point. Of course, the day would promise more waiting…
We finally got the Vilseck, but we had to figure out what to do because we’d arrived during a time when [Benoit] was on leave so he didn’t have to sign in because we were going to England the next day. I really had no concept of time at this point or how the days blended from one to the next, especially with the time changes, but with all the travelling it had been well over twenty four hours with less sleep than I like or am accustomed to. We waited to get picked up by our “sponsor,” the one who told us the day we flew that he was suddenly without a car to pick us up. He came in his friend’s car and had to take two loads to take our spare suitcases to his office in preparation for our flight the next day to Manchester. We’d purposefully packed a couple of suitcases and carry-ons for England, and left the rest to be stored until we came back.
The friend dropped us off in the town near the train station for some food, but he was very reluctant to help out and kinda acted like we were very much inconveniencing him. We later realized that it was only a six mile roundtrip journey to and from the train station so hardly a bank breaker or a time consumer. We got food unimpeded by our suitcases, which were left in the car, which I felt was a bad idea to be brought back later for our train journey to Nuremberg. We ate and they were almost late with the bags. We got on the train to Nuremberg, which took an hour or so, and then at the train station we asked directions for the next day how to get to the airport from the station (via the underground), and for the nearest hotel. Apparently we’d arrived on a day when some special food festival was going on and, thus, all hotel prices were effectively doubled, and hotels were booked up, so we found a room for 120 Euros not far from the station. Even though we’d only just arrived in Germany the guy at the information desk told us something along the lines of “You can learn new word. Flughafen. Airport.”
Our room was very small and contained two very narrow beds with small duvets on them. This was an upgrade from the only room available when we arrived—a single room with one bed—but the man at the desk gave us the two bed room which was previously occupied by a lady who just needed a one-bedroom, but had been given a two-bedroom, yeah… The bathroom was adequate. I was relieved finally to be “somewhere” after being a bit of a homeless hermit for quite some time. I decided a toast would be in order—vodka and orange juice because it was the best available—and, after shaking the orange juice, I recall asking [Benoit] to unscrew the lid for me, and then my tired brain proceeded again to shake the orange juice…all over everything and, sadly, [Benoit]’s bed and duvet, so he mostly had a wet bed. I tried, unsuccessfully, to clean off the bed with a towel and some water, which probably made matters worse, and then I tried to use the mini-vacuum cleaner-like hose/hairdryer to “dry” the bed too, but it wasn’t powerful enough to even make a difference. Poor [Benoit]. I was so tired at this point. It took my body a bit to settle, but I eventually fell asleep after [Benoit].
Since it’s now 2.48 am this is ‘To be continued…’
Please excuse any errors. I hope you have a good night and sleep well.
[Written on] 25 November 2013 [describing early October 2013]
We walked to the train station after collecting our things. You can pretty much see the train station from this hotel, so it wasn’t far at all. We’d become pros at taking the escalators from the train station to the underground and we waited for the train to the Flughafen (which means airport, but I’m probably spelling that word incorrectly). I’d booked the flights, so when we went to the check-in desk we were told that I hadn’t opted to pay for luggage, and I’d booked a non-luggage flight, so we had to go over to some other desk to pay the €30 for our one suitcase, which left us with a lot to carry on. As [Benoit] was at the counter, I was still standing in line, and a French girl approached me and said that her connection was soon and she needed to skip ahead—[Benoit], by this point, had figured out she was French because I wasn’t quite getting all the of the communication and spoke to her in French, which seemed to confuse her because she kept looking and me and at him, confused that I didn’t speak French (I suppose) and that he did. Anyway, he let her get to the window so she wouldn’t miss her flight.
We arrived in Amsterdam, but, despite having looked up the map of the airport in one of those Skymall magazines, it didn’t do justice to the size of the airport and the distance between gates. Needless to say we quite literally had to run to our next flight not to miss it. It was a significant distance and I was thoroughly out of breath. The Amsterdam airport is pretty un-secure as far as the main terminal, so each gate has its own luggage security check so we had to go through all that again before getting into a seating area to wait for the flight, and, naturally, loads of people were waiting and it took quite some time.
We arrived in Manchester and I think that at least twenty flights must have arrived simultaneously because I have never seen the customs area so congested. There were hundreds of EU nationals waiting in line to show their passports, and the non-EU nationals had a line that was zero people deep and everyone could just zip right through. This is perhaps the only moment I have wished for an American passport too. Kindly, [Benoit] waited in line for me whilst I stood against some chairs next to the line. It took an hour and a half of waiting for what usually takes under fifteen minutes. Also waiting beside me was a man in his sixties maybe; he’d retired early and lived with his decade (or more) younger wife in Spain. He was really nice to talk to. They were back in England for the week on business to sort out some things with their rental properties there. He talked about how nice it was to live in Spain; his wife had readily taken to the language and he could just about get by. I think he worked in some sort of finance/business job where he travelled a lot, which had thankfully left him enough to settle in Spain. They came back to England regularly to visit family, but they were happy with the pace of life where they were. [Benoit] caught up to me in line so I took his place and he waited for me on the other side. As we were all moving like cattle through the roped-off bits to passport control I observed a little girl walking along the rope with her tongue out, licking it. I found this amusing.
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