Entered on 2001-10-13 at 9:03 p.m..
Pictures
The long awaited pictures are here. Because it has been so long since I started my adventure, there are lots of pictures of different things, so just bear with me. I'll leave the pictures up on the site until I run out of my memory alotment, then they will disappear in the order they were posted.
To start at the beginning here is a picture of my mom with the pile of boxes in our laundry room.
And here they are again in our van right before we arranged them on a single pallet, much to the bemusement of the forklift operator, and shrunk wrapped them to said pallet.
While my boxes were having a good time with the other freight bound for the UK, exchanging the usual pleasentries and bemoaning the pittiful view and crew servide, I was off galavanting across europe. So here is a picture of the person I got along best with out of the Marshalls, Talia. She is studying palaeontology at Wolfson College, Oxford. Other various Marshalls are in line in the background. Needless to say security measures didn't speed up the process of checking us in at Dulles.
Well as you know, we all arrived in London safely, and then on Friday we all went on our merry way. Now it is rather obvious that the people living in London, had the shortest distance to travel. They, however had the most complicated send off. The elected to get cabs rather than to walk their baggage the 15 minutes to their new accomidation. Now if you had seen the shear size of their luggage, you would agree that this was a good idea. Unfortunately there are no logisticians studying in London, for it took them about 30 seconds to hail the two cabs deemed necessary and a little over 25 minutes to load them up. Here are some pictures of the event...
On to Switzerland. Becca has already covered the finer points of the story, so I won't bother reposting the pictures, but I have one more chapter to add. So on the morning I was going to leave, Becca put me on a train to Zurich. Once in Zurich I would have about 3 hours to kill, so I decided to walk around the town. Upon returning to the train station and eating a chocolate covered banana for lunch, I headed for the 2:04 train to the airport. It was then that I noticed a large crowd of people holding banners. Now as the german was very simple I read it, and then had my translation confirmed by the corresponding english banner just below the german one. Apparently Swiss air had gone bankrupt durring my stay and the flight crews were none too happy about not being bailed out. I was definitely glad to be flying Easy Jet that day. Of course that was not the end of my adventure, because apparently I had purchased the wrong ticket for the train. I'm not sure how, because I just went up to the ticket window and asked for a ticket to the airport. However this was before I went wandering. Because I was low on Swiss Franks, and I wanted to make sure to have enough for the ticket, I bought it as soon as I arrived. Well it turns out that some tickets are sold by time and zone. I hadn't really looked at my ticket until the conductor told me it was no good. To which I told him that I had only 3 Franks on me, and I wasn't sure what to do about the situation. Thankfully a nice Swiss man paid for my ticket, all the while muttering about what a prick the conductor was being. I was obviously a foreigner who didn't realize she had been sold a timed ticket, as it was clearly not used and for just an hour prior... I decided not to take that man's picture.
I made it back to London in one piece, and then on to Cranfield. Here is our house: 1 Lanchester Rd. The window with the arrow pointing to it is mine. My room spans the width of the house, so I also have a nice big set of windows on the opposite wall.
I live with three guys Which is driving my mother crazy. I have bad pictures of two of them and will endeavour to get better ones of all of them. The first is Flo, short for Florian. The second is Daaavid, spanish for David.
david's picture didn't make it on to the disk.
This week I managed to find and defend a desk/cube. Here are pictures of it...
I'll end with a picture of the boxes in the downstairs hallway, in my house in Cranfield. Currently I'm almost done unpacking, with the exception of finding places to put all fo my clothes (I didn't pack enough coat hangers), and all my bathroom stuff since I don't have a sink counter to hide it all under...
I am up and running though computer wise, as I bought a power strip today. I also bought a mobile phone today, when I varify that it works, I'll send out the new phone number as the old phone number that I gave out will cease to work in the beginning of November. For people who really like to talk, MOM, now you will be able to reach me all the time!
