The Offline Diaries - Week 1 & 2
Oct. 10th, 2003 01:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hmpfWeek One
It just occurred to me that just one week ago I was having a nervous breakdown in Frankfurt. It doesn't seem like a week. It seems like a year.
The last few days before leaving for England weren't pretty. The stress – not inconsiderable even under 'normal' conditions – was amplified by the rather unwise decision to take part in the Bochum comic fair. We, i.e. members of the farscaped mailing list and of the sf-community.de Farscape forum, had breakfast with Virginia Hey there – an event that I will report on at a later time, when things here have settled down a bit – and had a Save Farscape table at the comic fair. Although I do not regret a single second of that weekend, it cost me two precious days that I could have used to get my things ready for the move. It is very possible that even *with* these two days I would have been a nervous wreck by the end of the week, but without them, I came pretty close to the breaking point within the last few days in Germany. Until shortly before the end of the week, I still expected to be able to meet the Frankfurt Farscape 'Stammtisch' one last time before I left, but during the last two days I began to realise that that would not be possible. The days just didn't have enough hours.
(In fact, I did get around to visiting the 'Stammtisch' in passing, and chose that moment to have a full-blown breakdown. I think I entered the restaurant already crying, mostly from exhaustion, and I only stopped for a little moment, when the exhaustion lessened a little, to then begin crying again, this time due to the goodbye. I received several hugs and told everybody that I loved them, and then I was off again, to get the rest of my boxes stowed away, and start the actual packing. At something like 11 in the evening. I think I worked till around three a.m.)
At least I got to see many of my friends when they helped me with the move (and on some other occasions during that week). In fact, the week was full of tearful goodbyes, possibly the worst one being the goodbye from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ankae whom I knew I would only see again in at least a year and a half, because she will leave for New Zealand just a few months after my move to Birmingham.
I miss everybody, but, for the moment, in a somewhat abstract way. Life here in Birmingham doesn't leave me much space for homesickness of any kind. In a way, I am too busy making a new home to truly feel that I have left my real home.
Some goodbyes were gradual. When I left on Saturday, I only had to say goodbye to my mother. My father – who can be remarkably crazy sometimes - had decided to take me to England by car(!). (Of course, he only decided that *after * I had already bought a bus ticket. Fortunately I could cancel the ticket.)
Due to my mismanagement of my time in the last seven days or so before the departure I only finished packing at around two in the afternoon of the day we were supposed to be leaving. I am sure my parents sat on hot coals every bit as much as I while I was trying to get the last of my luggage – and the last of my paperwork! - ready. Finally, around three o'clock in the afternoon, we were ready to travel. We had about five and a half hours on the highway, across four European countries before us, but as far as I was concerned, I was finally able to relax somewhat. For a little while, things were out of my hands, and there was nothing I could do but sit back and wait.
I enjoyed the drive. These days I get to spend far too little time with my perpetually stressed father, and I appreciated the opportunity to be close to him for a little while. He is bewildered by many of the things I do and often tends to leave closer contact with me to my mother nowadays, and when we do have closer contact, try and have a conversation, we often end up quarrelling. Which is a shame, but of course tends to happen a lot among parents and children.
Anyway, whenever I actually get to spend time with my dad under not so stressful conditions, we actually get along amazingly well. And so we did this time, too. So, the trips from Frankfurt to Calais, and in the morning from Calais to Dover and from Dover on to Birmingham were a very enjoyable experience. And it was very nice to have my father around for the first one and a half days in Birmingham, too. Not just because he would run errands for me and buy me bedding and electrical adaptors ;-) but also because I really enjoy every moment I get to spend with him. On Sunday evening, after the welcome program for the Erasmus students, I was too tired to actually do anything anymore, but on Monday evening I skipped the Erasmus events and went to have dinner with my father instead (at Thank God It's Fridays, btw. *g *).
House hunting didn't start very promising. After having been asked by a nice Vietnamese-French guy called Pierre to join his group of house hunting students, I had been making calls all day without much success – all the houses for six people, the size of our group, were already taken. By evening, we were all of us exhausted and frustrated, and expecting to be 'homeless' for quite a while yet. We began to think about splitting up, because it seemed to be easier for smaller groups to find houses. However, the next morning, one of our group made things easier for us by joining another group, so that suddenly there were only five of us. After a long hour or so of making calls we finally had some appointments, and split up to attend several of them at the same time. As it happened, one of the two first houses turned out to be pretty good – and, pressed by the landlord and the knowledge that two or three other groups were also interested in the same house, we signed the contract just two hours later. Then I said goodbye to my father who was to return home that day, and then we were, for all purposes, free for the rest of the day, so I went back to my room, tried to work on my article for the SF-Radio Farscape special, and promptly fell asleep. I woke up a few hours later, went to have fish and chips with two of my French housemates-to-be, then started to make a shopping list with them.
The next day we spent shopping. That is, the first half of the day we were busy vacating our rooms in the student accomodation at Pritchatts Rd. on campus – we had to take a minibus taxi to get all our stuff from there to our house, and even so, some of us had to walk, because there wasn't room in the taxi for us *and* our stuff. So, Pierre and I walked home. When we arrived, the girls and Antonio had already carried all of our various bags and suitcases into the house, and we could proceed to drawing lots for the rooms. I ended up with the large front room on the first floor, a room I didn't at first feel entirely comfortable with but which had a very nice bookcase. So, after everybody knew where they would sleep that night, we caught a bus to the city centre and went shopping for household goods.
The city centre is a monstrosity – Offenbach on a larger scale. If there are any 'naturally grown' shopping streets left, I haven't found them yet. All there seems to be is huge shopping centres teeming with security guards in bulletproof vests, and dirty side streets. We ended up having a rather sad lunch at Wimpy's and, by asking around, found a number of discount stores a little way off the main shopping streets. There, we spent the next few hours trying to decide what the absolute minimum of equipment for a household of five people would be. By 18:00 we were proud owners of about 200 pounds' worth of household goods, and ready to overload another taxi with our belongings. The Pakistani shop assistant obligingly called us a taxi, and our dismay was great when we saw that he had - optimistically - called a normal sized taxi. At the expense of air and breathing space we did manage to get everything and almost everybody in, but Pierre – as in the morning – had to catch a bus.
Totally drained, we celebrated our new house by going to a restaurant to have pizza, then went home and collapsed on our beds and slept like babies.
The next day was devoted almost entirely to cleaning the house. I spent six hours removing mould from the fridge, while Géraldine and Marie-Laure did the same for the bathroom, and Pierre and Antonio worked on other parts of the house. Despite being freshly renovated and redecorated, the hose was a mess. Clearly the students who had lived there before us hadn't bothered much with cleaning. We continued our theme of overkill with dinner that evening, when we ordered pizza from a pizza service that offered 'Buy one XL, get two regular for free!' Not quite able to believe that XL would really be XL, we ordered two XL and got four regular ones for free. . . Let it suffice to say that we ate until we were almost sick and still had enough pizza left for lunch and dinner next day. *g *
Week Two:
After the equipping and cleaning of the house were more or less done, things settled down a bit for us, and for my part I used the next few days to work on my website, even though I still didn't know when we would be able to get a phone line and internet access, and to read excessively.
The outside world started placing demands on us again by Monday, when we were expected to attend an orientation day organised by the university. This orientation day heralded a week of paper- and leg work, with all of us running from department to department and office to office at the university to complete and hand in a number of forms and gather information regarding courses. In fact, all this kept me so busy that I neglected opening a bank account right away, which is now proving a problem because we would have needed that bank account to register with a phone company...
We only got around to enquiring about phone companies and internet service providers in the last two days, and to our dismay found out that we had just missed a discount by signing up too late, and that we would have to pay for a full twelve months even if we were only going to use the line for about eight of these. And, as if that wasn't enough 'good news' already, we also found that the earliest date by which our phone might get installed was by the middle of October, and quite possibly later. Needless to say I won't be having DSL here, either, as I'm the only person here who has a computer and it's way too expensive for me alone. I'm beginning to think we shouldn't get a phone line at all, and I should just buy a network card, and carry my laptop to university to log onto the internet there. I really think that might be the best solution, even if it means living without a phone and without internet access at home for nine months.
To end this on a more positive note: I bought a few books I've been wanting to read for a long time here this week – Iain M. Banks' 'Consider Phlebas', and Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun', parts one through four in two volumes, in a very nice edition (there are, AFAIK, two editions available at the moment, one of which is extremely ugly). I'm really looking forward to read these. And, with no internet access in the foreseeable future, it looks like I will have a lot of time to read.
A note to everyone I usually read on LJ, and to everyone else:
I've been out of the loop for three weeks or a little more now – I was already too busy to really pursue my online life in the week(s) before I left Germany – so I don't know what's been going on in your lives. However, my thoughts are with you often – with you, and with my other friends both on- and offline. I miss you all. Unfortunately it is very difficult indeed for me to find internet access here. Only yesterday I have discovered another, bigger computer pool at the university; before that, I could only use the internet in the library, where there are about 12 computers for about 30.000 students – you can imagine the queues. I will try to catch up ASAP, but I can't promise anything from my internet-deprived position here.
It just occurred to me that just one week ago I was having a nervous breakdown in Frankfurt. It doesn't seem like a week. It seems like a year.
The last few days before leaving for England weren't pretty. The stress – not inconsiderable even under 'normal' conditions – was amplified by the rather unwise decision to take part in the Bochum comic fair. We, i.e. members of the farscaped mailing list and of the sf-community.de Farscape forum, had breakfast with Virginia Hey there – an event that I will report on at a later time, when things here have settled down a bit – and had a Save Farscape table at the comic fair. Although I do not regret a single second of that weekend, it cost me two precious days that I could have used to get my things ready for the move. It is very possible that even *with* these two days I would have been a nervous wreck by the end of the week, but without them, I came pretty close to the breaking point within the last few days in Germany. Until shortly before the end of the week, I still expected to be able to meet the Frankfurt Farscape 'Stammtisch' one last time before I left, but during the last two days I began to realise that that would not be possible. The days just didn't have enough hours.
(In fact, I did get around to visiting the 'Stammtisch' in passing, and chose that moment to have a full-blown breakdown. I think I entered the restaurant already crying, mostly from exhaustion, and I only stopped for a little moment, when the exhaustion lessened a little, to then begin crying again, this time due to the goodbye. I received several hugs and told everybody that I loved them, and then I was off again, to get the rest of my boxes stowed away, and start the actual packing. At something like 11 in the evening. I think I worked till around three a.m.)
At least I got to see many of my friends when they helped me with the move (and on some other occasions during that week). In fact, the week was full of tearful goodbyes, possibly the worst one being the goodbye from
ankae whom I knew I would only see again in at least a year and a half, because she will leave for New Zealand just a few months after my move to Birmingham. I miss everybody, but, for the moment, in a somewhat abstract way. Life here in Birmingham doesn't leave me much space for homesickness of any kind. In a way, I am too busy making a new home to truly feel that I have left my real home.
Some goodbyes were gradual. When I left on Saturday, I only had to say goodbye to my mother. My father – who can be remarkably crazy sometimes - had decided to take me to England by car(!). (Of course, he only decided that *after * I had already bought a bus ticket. Fortunately I could cancel the ticket.)
Due to my mismanagement of my time in the last seven days or so before the departure I only finished packing at around two in the afternoon of the day we were supposed to be leaving. I am sure my parents sat on hot coals every bit as much as I while I was trying to get the last of my luggage – and the last of my paperwork! - ready. Finally, around three o'clock in the afternoon, we were ready to travel. We had about five and a half hours on the highway, across four European countries before us, but as far as I was concerned, I was finally able to relax somewhat. For a little while, things were out of my hands, and there was nothing I could do but sit back and wait.
I enjoyed the drive. These days I get to spend far too little time with my perpetually stressed father, and I appreciated the opportunity to be close to him for a little while. He is bewildered by many of the things I do and often tends to leave closer contact with me to my mother nowadays, and when we do have closer contact, try and have a conversation, we often end up quarrelling. Which is a shame, but of course tends to happen a lot among parents and children.
Anyway, whenever I actually get to spend time with my dad under not so stressful conditions, we actually get along amazingly well. And so we did this time, too. So, the trips from Frankfurt to Calais, and in the morning from Calais to Dover and from Dover on to Birmingham were a very enjoyable experience. And it was very nice to have my father around for the first one and a half days in Birmingham, too. Not just because he would run errands for me and buy me bedding and electrical adaptors ;-) but also because I really enjoy every moment I get to spend with him. On Sunday evening, after the welcome program for the Erasmus students, I was too tired to actually do anything anymore, but on Monday evening I skipped the Erasmus events and went to have dinner with my father instead (at Thank God It's Fridays, btw. *g *).
House hunting didn't start very promising. After having been asked by a nice Vietnamese-French guy called Pierre to join his group of house hunting students, I had been making calls all day without much success – all the houses for six people, the size of our group, were already taken. By evening, we were all of us exhausted and frustrated, and expecting to be 'homeless' for quite a while yet. We began to think about splitting up, because it seemed to be easier for smaller groups to find houses. However, the next morning, one of our group made things easier for us by joining another group, so that suddenly there were only five of us. After a long hour or so of making calls we finally had some appointments, and split up to attend several of them at the same time. As it happened, one of the two first houses turned out to be pretty good – and, pressed by the landlord and the knowledge that two or three other groups were also interested in the same house, we signed the contract just two hours later. Then I said goodbye to my father who was to return home that day, and then we were, for all purposes, free for the rest of the day, so I went back to my room, tried to work on my article for the SF-Radio Farscape special, and promptly fell asleep. I woke up a few hours later, went to have fish and chips with two of my French housemates-to-be, then started to make a shopping list with them.
The next day we spent shopping. That is, the first half of the day we were busy vacating our rooms in the student accomodation at Pritchatts Rd. on campus – we had to take a minibus taxi to get all our stuff from there to our house, and even so, some of us had to walk, because there wasn't room in the taxi for us *and* our stuff. So, Pierre and I walked home. When we arrived, the girls and Antonio had already carried all of our various bags and suitcases into the house, and we could proceed to drawing lots for the rooms. I ended up with the large front room on the first floor, a room I didn't at first feel entirely comfortable with but which had a very nice bookcase. So, after everybody knew where they would sleep that night, we caught a bus to the city centre and went shopping for household goods.
The city centre is a monstrosity – Offenbach on a larger scale. If there are any 'naturally grown' shopping streets left, I haven't found them yet. All there seems to be is huge shopping centres teeming with security guards in bulletproof vests, and dirty side streets. We ended up having a rather sad lunch at Wimpy's and, by asking around, found a number of discount stores a little way off the main shopping streets. There, we spent the next few hours trying to decide what the absolute minimum of equipment for a household of five people would be. By 18:00 we were proud owners of about 200 pounds' worth of household goods, and ready to overload another taxi with our belongings. The Pakistani shop assistant obligingly called us a taxi, and our dismay was great when we saw that he had - optimistically - called a normal sized taxi. At the expense of air and breathing space we did manage to get everything and almost everybody in, but Pierre – as in the morning – had to catch a bus.
Totally drained, we celebrated our new house by going to a restaurant to have pizza, then went home and collapsed on our beds and slept like babies.
The next day was devoted almost entirely to cleaning the house. I spent six hours removing mould from the fridge, while Géraldine and Marie-Laure did the same for the bathroom, and Pierre and Antonio worked on other parts of the house. Despite being freshly renovated and redecorated, the hose was a mess. Clearly the students who had lived there before us hadn't bothered much with cleaning. We continued our theme of overkill with dinner that evening, when we ordered pizza from a pizza service that offered 'Buy one XL, get two regular for free!' Not quite able to believe that XL would really be XL, we ordered two XL and got four regular ones for free. . . Let it suffice to say that we ate until we were almost sick and still had enough pizza left for lunch and dinner next day. *g *
Week Two:
After the equipping and cleaning of the house were more or less done, things settled down a bit for us, and for my part I used the next few days to work on my website, even though I still didn't know when we would be able to get a phone line and internet access, and to read excessively.
The outside world started placing demands on us again by Monday, when we were expected to attend an orientation day organised by the university. This orientation day heralded a week of paper- and leg work, with all of us running from department to department and office to office at the university to complete and hand in a number of forms and gather information regarding courses. In fact, all this kept me so busy that I neglected opening a bank account right away, which is now proving a problem because we would have needed that bank account to register with a phone company...
We only got around to enquiring about phone companies and internet service providers in the last two days, and to our dismay found out that we had just missed a discount by signing up too late, and that we would have to pay for a full twelve months even if we were only going to use the line for about eight of these. And, as if that wasn't enough 'good news' already, we also found that the earliest date by which our phone might get installed was by the middle of October, and quite possibly later. Needless to say I won't be having DSL here, either, as I'm the only person here who has a computer and it's way too expensive for me alone. I'm beginning to think we shouldn't get a phone line at all, and I should just buy a network card, and carry my laptop to university to log onto the internet there. I really think that might be the best solution, even if it means living without a phone and without internet access at home for nine months.
To end this on a more positive note: I bought a few books I've been wanting to read for a long time here this week – Iain M. Banks' 'Consider Phlebas', and Gene Wolfe's 'Book of the New Sun', parts one through four in two volumes, in a very nice edition (there are, AFAIK, two editions available at the moment, one of which is extremely ugly). I'm really looking forward to read these. And, with no internet access in the foreseeable future, it looks like I will have a lot of time to read.
A note to everyone I usually read on LJ, and to everyone else:
I've been out of the loop for three weeks or a little more now – I was already too busy to really pursue my online life in the week(s) before I left Germany – so I don't know what's been going on in your lives. However, my thoughts are with you often – with you, and with my other friends both on- and offline. I miss you all. Unfortunately it is very difficult indeed for me to find internet access here. Only yesterday I have discovered another, bigger computer pool at the university; before that, I could only use the internet in the library, where there are about 12 computers for about 30.000 students – you can imagine the queues. I will try to catch up ASAP, but I can't promise anything from my internet-deprived position here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
I'm here :)
Date: 2003-10-09 05:24 pm (UTC)Enjoy your stay in Birmingham! And don't worry too much. Your friends will wait for you and we will stay in contact. Take your time to calm down. :)
I know that you liked to have better contact/better internet and phone access right now. But as long as there is no possibility to change it, enjoy the advantages that come along with it. You will catch up on everything and we will keep - or bring - you up-to-date.