Travel Plans

Trying to get out of Germany cannot possibly be as difficult as getting out of Poland, but I can try to make it so.

I have too many belongings. When I went to the house super at 7:30 this morning, I did not realise that I would have to move out to-day rather than to-morrow, and that I would have to clean my kitchen and bath before doing so. I thus was not able to effectively cull my belongings, and have several unwieldy bags and boxes of detritus, which I am sorting through gradually. Unfortunately, I have to drag these bags and boxes all over the map, because I can't leave them in the room that I no longer have a key to. The task for to-morrow is to winnow my luggage such that I can bring it in one trip to Jeremy's WG in Berlin.

So it turns out that when I got my visa, I unwisely set it to expire on the same day that my room was to pass out of my possession, assuming apparently that I would have no friends who might shelter me if I were to wish to stay slightly longer. It turns out in fact that I do wish to stay slightly longer, so I've been meaning to go to the town hall for several days now to remedy the situation. Unfortunately, I had a test Friday morning, the office is closed on Mondays, I was in Dresden all Tuesday, they are closed on Wednesdays, and I had to move out to-day. So I will finally be talking to them to-morrow morning at 9, on the last day that my visa is valid. I really hope that they will prolong my visa without an issue; I really could just have easily have set it to expire at the end of August in the first place. Again, I do not remember my thought process at all.

Anyway, the reason that I wish to stay longer, and in fact that I need to stay longer, is that I will be going on Sunday to the Univeristy of Tübingen in south-western Germany, south of Stuttgart. I'm going to do some work on a project there, and apparently it is important enough that I actually go to visit them that they are paying for my train ticket. I will arrive Sunday afternoon, and will leave Monday evening, arriving back in Berlin on Tuesday morning. (A side note: Tübingen might even have been a nice place to do my term abroad, except in that I would have had to try to teach everyone to pronounce Tübingen.)

On Wednesday afternoon at 4, I fly out of Berlin, through London, to Boston. I will get rid of my luggage there, and then the next morning fly home. I mean, insofar as I consider Akron "home," which is pretty far, actually. Akron really is like a second home to me, and I think a lot of people probably feel the same way.