I'll have a large soup sandwich, please...

OK, so I know some of you are anxiously (really?) awaiting part 2 of "Leaving on a jet plane," but I really have to get this all down while it's fresh in my mind. So I posted on my facebook page yesterday that we're supposed to be having our container delivered today. So exciting. I realized about 14 hours too late that I got a little bit excited about something that should be pretty straightforward... container arrives in port, clears customs, gets loaded on truck, truck drives to our building, truck gets unloaded, and stuff is delivered to our apartment. I may have missed a few things in between arriving in port and getting loaded on truck, but I'm not going to worry too much about it, because where I come into this story, the container has already cleared customs.

This is probably a good place to interject what some of you may have already deduced. I'm a little wordy. I don't really tell short stories. I kind of feel like the best parts of stories are in the details. I drive Caleb nuts because he'll tell me something in two sentences, and I'll ask him seventeen detail-oriented questions... none of which he can answer. So, feel free to stop reading at any time... it's just kind of the details in all of this that make it the soup sandwich that it is.

Anyway, that brings me to now. Here's how this morning has gone down: I had to tell Abdul (our awesome driver who takes the kids to and from school because I can't get my driver's license yet) that we gave the truck driver his name and phone number because the driver only speaks Hindi. Abdul is one of a very short list of people in Abu Dhabi whom I know well enough to ask a favor involving speaking Hindi. Abdul says he'll talk to him when he calls. Fast forward to 45 minutes ago. Abdul calls me to tell me Yousef, the driver, is almost at the security gate. I have already talked to the security guard to let him know we have a big delivery coming. As I go downstairs and walk outside, I see the truck with the container on it heading away from security. I'll give you a moment to picture the awesomeness of watching the truck with your container holding all of your belongings on it driving away.
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Did you picture it? Great! So I call Abdul back. He tells me he's not sure where the guy's going... maybe to the other gate? So I hightail it to the other security gate on the other side of the complex. It's about a 5 minute walk... not far. Only it's 95 degrees outside with a "feels like" temp of 115. And 67% humidity. At NINE in the morning. So imagine my surprise, when I arrive dripping with sweat (imagine how glamorous I felt!) only to see... you guessed it... NO TRUCK! I proceed to tell that security guard that a truck is coming for us and please let him in. Then I head back to my building and come upstairs. I change my shirt, because, no lie, I am sweating more than I did in some basketball practices I've been through.

This is when I call Caleb and ask him to call the "Boss Man" to figure out what's going on. Caleb calls me back in a few short minutes to tell me the truck is at security again, and they won't let him in. Only this time, I grow a brain and decide to look off the balcony to check. I'm sure you'll be as surprised as I was to find that there wasn't a truck at the security gate I could see. Nor was there a truck waiting at the two security gates to the island, nor was there one waiting at the gate at the island next to us. There was one gate that I couldn't see, the one I had to walk to before, but there was no way I was going to walk to that one and have to change my shirt yet again. I probably would have redlined the stinkometer after that.  Instead, I decided to go downstairs and talk to my friend Fez Ali. He's the concierge guy at another building. I mentioned him on facebook one time. He saved our beach towels from almost certain demise. But that's another story for another day. I am happier than a pig in poop to announce that I now know not one, but TWO people in Abu Dhabi who speak Hindi and will translate for me. The bonus is that I can understand Fez Ali way better. He called the driver and got the scoop. The driver is parked somewhere in a "good location." I honestly have no idea what "good location" in this situation even means, but I nod my head anyway. Apparently, security won't allow a big truck with a container loaded on it to deliver to our buildings because the roads are too narrow and too hard to maneuver. So now, Yousef is waiting in that "good location" for a smaller truck. They will then offload a small truckoad of stuff at a time, drive it through security, unload it for several trips in the elevator, and deliver it to our apartment on the 9th floor. After Fez Ali passes on all this information to me, I get a call from Abdul. He tells me to come outside, as he's in front of our building. Keep in mind that I only ever asked him to give Yousef directions if he got lost. Abdul had gone way above and beyond. Anyway, I walk over to his van, and he's got two guys from the delivery company with him, only he didn't really tell me who they were, so after a few awkward "Will you please speak slowers" on my part, I found out they were with the delivery company. In a nutshell, they tell me the same thing Fez Ali just told me.  

Since there's nothing more I can do, I give one of the delivery company guys my phone number and tell him to call me when they need me to come downstairs.

A few hours pass, and I get a phone call. I come downstairs and see this, in all its glory:

And then I see things like this:

While this might not seem like a big deal, it is. That box is supposed to be not only closed, but taped shut. And see that greasy stain down the side? Yeah, not supposed to be there. As a matter of fact, there were a lot of boxes with greasy stains on them, some much worse than this one. Seriously, after I started wondering/worrying what had been ruined, I reminded myself that this was all just stuff. I was just hoping it wasn't a box of scrapbooks or photo albums with greasy stains on it.

There were about six guys helping altogether. About four of them were helping unload the truck. Someone was also loading the elevator and bringing the stuff up so he could unload it on our floor, and there was one guy upstairs with me... he was going back and forth from the elevator landing, where an elevator load of stuff was sitting unloaded for him to move into my apartment. Overall, it was a more efficient process than I ever expected given the fiasco earlier in the day. He was pretty good about delivering stuff to the proper rooms, and he was very nice and polite. The only problem is, THIS is how most of our stuff looked once it was sitting inside our apartment:

And this is only a small sample of photos. I decided to just stop taking them... it was too depressing. It looks as if someone played a game of hopscotch across the tops of the boxes. Or maybe it was just more fun to see how far they could be thrown from four feet up in the container straight down to the ground. Any box that you see in the photos that has tan-colored shipping tape on it has been opened by customs. I have no problems with customs doing their jobs. Trust me. The only thing is that they opened almost every single box they inspected FROM THE BOTTOM. So my boxes that were labeled on top and were haphazardly taped back together had to be turned over again to figure out where they went. Not to mention, things that were in one box when they left my house were in completely different boxes when they got here. Believe it or not, in the 30 or so boxes I've unpacked, there have only been a handful of broken things. Some of you will mourn these with me: my neti-pot (also known as my self-waterboarding device), my DARK BROWN because it's been used so much Pampered Chef stone, a bowl that was part of a set of china I got from my mom (replaceable). There is also a small, broken piece of wood on the hutch that my great-grandfather made, but I think it could be repaired. The one thing I thought I had gotten a photo of but didn't: our fireproof safe. They ripped the hinges off of it to make sure there was nothing inside that shouldn't be, although now, as I'm sure you can guess, it's worthless. All I could think of as a caption to a photo of a safe with the hinges broken off is from lolcatz: "Ur doin' it wrong!"

I am interested to see what other little surprises I discover as I continue to unpack. The most exciting part of the whole process, though, is that we can now start to make this apartment look more like our home instead of this:

 

It looks like a sad little bachelor pad with the soccer mom chair and the inflatable chair and ottoman, doesn't it?

Leaving on a jet plane (part 1)...

So I started this post about 9 days ago, but never quite finished it.  It's actually not the most pleasant thing to try to use your laptop on a plane when you're 6'2" and have pretty much zero leg room to begin with.  I finished the post after we actually arrived in the UAE.  This is a pretty long one, so be warned.  Without further ado...

Today's the day.  The one for which we've been waiting for MONTHS.  We are leaving Seattle and flying to Abu Dhabi via Chicago.  Today is going to be a long day.  And when I say long, please know that I mean LONG... four hour flight to Chicago, three hour layover, 14 (yes, I just said FOURTEEN) hour flight to Abu Dhabi, UAE.  I don't like to do anything for fourteen hours.  Not even sleep (unless I'm really tired) so today is going to be a challenge, not only for me, but for the girls.  I guess the good thing about all of this is that I won't be driving 14 hours, which is most definitely worse.  Add to those fourteen hours an 11 hour time difference, and we're just begging for chaos.  Anyway, you get the point.

So here's what it looks like in our hotel room right before we get ready to take the shuttle to the airport:

I realize this photo is small and of extremely poor quality, but it was taken by my phone camera in a poorly lit room at 7 in the morning.  Cut me some slack.

While I love my husband dearly, it was probably a good thing he wasn't in my physical presence while I was packing.  I probably would have punched him in the face if he had been at all near me. (All said with MUCH LOVE, honey!)  He kept telling me from halfway around the world that I needed to pack lightly, and that I didn't need to bring much with us.  How do you pack "lightly" when you're moving to the other side of the earth with your four kids?  In all, we managed to get all of our stuff in 7 120 liter bags and 5 backpacks.  I, myself, am pretty impressed with that feat. 

Fast forward to the first four-hour flight.  It was pretty uneventful.  The whole flying thing was fresh and new, nobody complained.  I was pretty happy about the Sprite served to my girls in those awesome little plastic airplane cups... no lids, of course... perched precariously on slippery tray tables ready to douse the nearest little lap with sticky goodness at any moment.  I actually asked the flight attendant if we could just have 1 whole bottle of water that we could share between the five of us.  She looked at me like I had 12 heads.  Apparently, the water bottle police don't allow a whole water bottle (with a LID) to be handed over on an aircraft.  Or maybe they do and I just asked someone who was having a bad day.  Either way, I'm so happy to announce that there were no spills of liquids on the flight to Chicago, and we arrived safely and on time.

I don't know if you've ever flown through O'Hare before, but the international terminal is a separate entity there.  Meaning, you have to take an elevated train to get to that terminal.  That was fun for the girls.  It accelerated at neck-snapping speeds, all while I am nagging the girls to hold on to the pole so they don't go flying to the back of the train car.  That very well could be the only time I remind my girls to hold onto a vertical pole.

We arrived at the international terminal and the girls are starving.  We have to check in with the airline flying us to Abu Dhabi before we can go through security, again.  Yep, you read that right, we got to go through security TWICE on this super awesome long day of travel.  I digress, though.  When we go to check in, they are weighing all of the carry-on luggage.  The girls are all okay, my backpack, however, is jammed with my laptop, an external hard drive, my camera and a couple of lenses, medical records that we're hand-carrying over, and miscellaneous other heavy things... none of which I wanted to place in my checked bags.  I'm proud to announce my carry-on bag weighed twice the legal limit.  Fortunately, I met an awesome supervisor named Mike who, after asking enough questions, concurred that none of the stuff in my bag should be checked, either.  He graciously allowed me to place a few of the things in my bag into my girls' bags, which were all underweight, and that brought my carry-on to only 10 kg instead of 14.  And he signed a special little tag saying I could bring it on the plane.  My personal, heartfelt thanks to Mike, again, even though I'm quite sure he'll never see this blog. 

Next step... security... again.  I will say that although the line was long, it went pretty smoothly.  Except Hannah had water in her brand new water bottle, I didn't take my external hard drive out of my bag (I didn't know I had to!) and my hands had to be swabbed, I'm guessing to check for residue of some sort?  I don't really know... I just kind of try to keep my mouth shut and do what they tell me to avoid any long delays.  I thought for sure the water bottle was going to have to be thrown away, because there was no way I was going to go empty it myself and go to the back of the security line.  This has happened to me before, and those were my options... throw it away or leave security, dump it out, and go back through the line.  Well, surprise of all surprises... the TSA agent dumped it out herself and ran it through the screener again, and let us take it.  Another big deal seeing as how that was the FIRST time that bottle had ever held water.  Thank you, TSA lady with common sense!

I mentioned before that my kids were starving, so after I get my shoes on, we decide to go eat.  Except there don't appear to be any restaurants after security.  Seriously, I about lost my mind.  Of course, there were the standard little stores/kiosks that had snacks and bags of chips and candy bars and stuff.  Not a single solitary restaurant.  There was, however, a sandwich stand right by our gate.  They also had cups of not 100% fresh (one or possibly two day-old) fruit and yogurt with fruit and granola.  Five little meals, five bottles of water, and $100 less in my wallet later, we were snacking on the floor by the window by our gate.  It was awesome.  I had to keep reminding Hannah to have a positive attitude because I was kind of reminding myself as well.  After we finished eating, we had just enough time to run to the bathroom in two different shifts so we don't have to take all of our crap with us.  Then it's time for the real fun to begin... it's time to board.  I'll continue that part of the story in part 2.  If you made it this far... thanks for reading!