It's almost midnight Sunday night, which means that I have something in the vicinity of thirteen hours before I have to leave for JFK. And I'M SO FREAKING EXCITED. I've flown before - I've been to California, Colorado, Florida, and Ohio. But I've never FLOWN OVER AN OCEAN or INTO A DIFFERENT COUNTRY. I'm packed (mostly). I just have to finish cleaning my room, throw some more things into my checked bag to make it weigh exactly 44.09 pounds (alternatively 20 kilos, but my scale doesn't have any clue what a kilo is), and finish packing my carry-ons. Then I'm all ready for trans-Atlantic travel.
Also on tomorrow's to-do list: Open an account with Bank of America, because they, unlike Chase bank, have a sister bank in the UK and thus no ATM charges; stop at the Greenwich Chase bank to trade in some American dollars for British pounds; go to the Apple store to exchange my headphones; print boarding passes; call Mount Holyoke's payroll office about my missing pay check; do a last load of laundry, and GO TO EDINBURGH. Pretty much in that order.
I'd say I should go to sleep, but I'm way too excited for that. So I'm going to go watch TV and put off everything on that to-do list until the sun comes up.
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Thursday, January 3, 2013
Packing!
It's Friday night, and I leave for Scotland on Monday. That's in three days.
In case packing wasn't enough to keep me occupied between now and then (with the addition of still moving all my stuff from my old house to the one my mom and her boyfriend just bought on the other side of town), I have two snags to keep me nice and busy over the next few days.
First, there's my wisdom teeth. They've been coming in for a while, no big deal. The top two are all the way in and almost fit, except for the fact that I keep biting my cheek on the left side. Constantly. It's super uncomfortable, so at the dentist today, he recommended getting them out before leaving the country for an extended period of time. So tomorrow morning, I get to go get the one problematic wisdom tooth pulled. Which means that my three days of packing needs to be crammed into tonight, in case I wind up sleeping a lot after (I hear painkillers can have a sleep-inducing sort of effect).
Secondly, I have some major plane ticket drama. My flight to Edinburgh stops in Dublin, which is apparently a big no-no. I thought this might be the case going into it, and I told my mom, who thought that it couldn't be a big enough issue to justify paying $500 more for a flight that didn't stop there. Wrong! After some panicked communication with The University of Edinburgh, it seems that you definitely can not come into Scotland with a tourist stamp from Ireland. Ruh-roh.
So I called the airline, Aer Lingus, but as an Irish carrier, all of their flights stop in Ireland. So I called Orbitz. They could switch me to a different flight with the same carrier, but any of those flights would also stop in Dublin. The ticket is non-refundable and non-transferrable, so... I'm going to Dublin!
The easiest fix, as far as I can see it, is to take my flight to Dublin, then take the loss on my flight to Edinburgh. Instead, I would take a flight to a not-too-out-of-the-way city (I'm thinking Amsterdam), and then another flight from there to Edinburgh. This could definitely not be more complicated. And to make it worse, I'm going to be spending about $500 on these two plane tickets - how much money my mom saved on this stress-inducing "cheaper" flight.
So now, in preparation for getting a tooth yanked out of my head tomorrow, I am going to start packing. This should be an interesting few days.
In case packing wasn't enough to keep me occupied between now and then (with the addition of still moving all my stuff from my old house to the one my mom and her boyfriend just bought on the other side of town), I have two snags to keep me nice and busy over the next few days.
First, there's my wisdom teeth. They've been coming in for a while, no big deal. The top two are all the way in and almost fit, except for the fact that I keep biting my cheek on the left side. Constantly. It's super uncomfortable, so at the dentist today, he recommended getting them out before leaving the country for an extended period of time. So tomorrow morning, I get to go get the one problematic wisdom tooth pulled. Which means that my three days of packing needs to be crammed into tonight, in case I wind up sleeping a lot after (I hear painkillers can have a sleep-inducing sort of effect).
Secondly, I have some major plane ticket drama. My flight to Edinburgh stops in Dublin, which is apparently a big no-no. I thought this might be the case going into it, and I told my mom, who thought that it couldn't be a big enough issue to justify paying $500 more for a flight that didn't stop there. Wrong! After some panicked communication with The University of Edinburgh, it seems that you definitely can not come into Scotland with a tourist stamp from Ireland. Ruh-roh.
So I called the airline, Aer Lingus, but as an Irish carrier, all of their flights stop in Ireland. So I called Orbitz. They could switch me to a different flight with the same carrier, but any of those flights would also stop in Dublin. The ticket is non-refundable and non-transferrable, so... I'm going to Dublin!
The easiest fix, as far as I can see it, is to take my flight to Dublin, then take the loss on my flight to Edinburgh. Instead, I would take a flight to a not-too-out-of-the-way city (I'm thinking Amsterdam), and then another flight from there to Edinburgh. This could definitely not be more complicated. And to make it worse, I'm going to be spending about $500 on these two plane tickets - how much money my mom saved on this stress-inducing "cheaper" flight.
So now, in preparation for getting a tooth yanked out of my head tomorrow, I am going to start packing. This should be an interesting few days.
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