Murphy's Law

Things are slowly and steadily moving along...

In the past week I've lined up medical insurance, got my police clearance letter (whew! no criminal record), got my renewed passport back in the mail, got medical report and TB test and generally organized the necessary paperwork to send off for my visa.

The last piece to the puzzle is, of course, the flight. I sent off a couple desperate emails to various contacts at the University, requesting any information at all as to when I was required to arrive, and finally decided that I wasn't going to hear back in time and just needed to pick a date on my own. I settled on leaving on January 30, a week before I have any obligations for my specific program. I researched the crap out of travel options and after one last check for an email from the University, a couple hours online and an hour on the phone with a couple different customer service reps, booked a flight from Seattle to Johannesburg (via L.A. and Amsterdam) on the 30th. Then I hung up, breathed a sigh of relief, tinkered around with reserving seats and meals online, and decided to check my University email again. Where I found a 30-minute old email informing me that I should plan to be present on campus for international student orientation no later than the morning of January 30.

Air travel is a marvelous thing, and it continues to amaze me how quickly I can be ripped from one culture, climate, language, and currency and thrust into another, with little chance for adjustment other than a few hours of restless sleep. But no degree of modern innovation would allow me to depart Seattle on Monday morning January the 30th and arrive halfway around the world, in another hemisphere, by Monday morning January the 30th. Even the time zones wouldn't help; Cape Town's Monday morning is 10 hours before Seattle's Monday morning. Right now what amazes me even more than modern transportation is that after a full month of pleading with the University to let me in on the grand secret of when school starts, they got the information to me exactly 30 minutes too late. Just 30 minutes.

But there's a third amazing fact in this story - and that is that Alaska Airlines offers penalty-less changes to flights within 72 hours of booking. So I called right back and talked to a third charming customer service representative (I'll put in a plug for Alaska Airlines customer service reps here - I've now had long-winded problem-solving chats with four of them and each one has been wonderful. Yay Alaska Airlines! You don't hear that much do you?) who promptly put me on a flight four days earlier.

So now, (drumroll please) I will be departing Seattle on January 26 (four less days in Seattle, *sob*) traveling for 36-ish or 48-ish hours (or something) through L.A. and Amsterdam to Johannesburg, where I still need to book one last flight to Cape Town. All in all I should probably be in Cape Town on campus (or close to it) on January 28. That is if I did my math right. God, I hope so, I don't know if the second change in 72 hours is still considered free.

And finally, I feel that even though I am not yet in Africa, this would be the perfect time to whip out the very first TIA of the season. This is Africa. You never know what's going to happen, you just roll with it.

The adventure commences...