Today has been an adventure.
Actually, it started yesterday. After class (Irish lit from 3 - 5), I met my dad to buy my plane ticket for Oldenburg. I retell him everything I had told my mom on the phone the other day as she confirmed that everything now is officially "official" (my prof offered to write me an official acceptance letter and everything if I needed it for any of my scholarships).
So, here's the plan:
I leave for Germany from Detroit on Wednesday, March 30th and take an overnight flight to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt, I have about a five hour layover before my flight to Bremen which will get in around 2:10 on Thursday, March 31st.
Step 2: Study at Oldenburg University for four months.
After classes end on July, 15th, I'll take a train through Germany and make Salzburg my home base for two weeks and travel around as much as possible. I really want to go to Venice, and my aunt has also suggested going to Italy. Another professor also suggested I go see his friend, the tour guide, in Bamberg, so that's also on the list.
So, Dad and I are sitting by Cafe O'Bears, trying to buy a plane ticket and talking about plans and why airlines are silly with their pricing. He says that he wants to get the plane ticket bought soon because he heard oil prices were skyrocketing and causing plane tickets to go up. It's no joke; since the day before, the tickets I want have jumped from $1077 to $1124. All in all, not a huge jump, but it was jarring to see the cost of my ticket jump drastically overnight.
Since there's not much we can do anyway, we suck it up and get ready to pay the $50 increase in ticket price. I put in all my information, hit "continue," and then a little red error message appears at the top of the screen.
"You're card has been DENIED." And there's a little flutter of panic in my stomach as my dad and I stare at the screen for a moment. He looks puzzled, and sits there for a moment contemplating what could have caused it to deny my card while my brain's buzzing through the same thing, though probably ten times less calm. We settle on two options: (1) either my card has a spending limit that we didn't know about or forgot about, or (2) the fact that I bounced a check to the IRS this morning has come back to bite me in the ass. Regardless, it doesn't look like we're buying a plane ticket today. We work out a plan for how we want to proceed, deciding to try again later and if it still doesn't work call the bank tomorrow morning. I say "good-bye" to my dad and hurry off to work in East Vandy (unfortunately without any coffee from O'Bears :< ).
At work, things mellow out quite a bit. I get a chance to talk to Emily and together we commiserate over buying plane tickets and the hassle of travel. Then she does me a serious solid and asks Rachel to bring me a sandwich from the cafe since I haven't eaten since before class. I retreat back to my table, do some homework, and Rachel becomes my new favorite person ever by bringing me a turkey, cheese, and delicious sandwich. It turns out to be a good night; I actually have an appointment and I get all my make-up Japanese homework done to turn in for the next day. I go home and decide that getting all my Japanese done deserves a little time doing nothing on Tumblr for awhile. Another fairly productive day spent.
THE NEXT DAY:
Since I forgot to try buying a plane ticket again the night before, I try again while drinking coffee. Big surprise, it still doesn't work. I text dad so he can call the bank and gallivant off to Japanese with Zan. I leave my phone in my back-pack all through class, and when I come out again, my phone's been bombarded by texts from my parents. Two from dad telling me I have to call the bank and how to get a real person on the line, and one from my mother telling me to call my dad. After unsuccessfully trying to get a hold of my dad, I assume he would just tell me to call the bank and follow the instructions in his text while getting food from the food court in the OC. I have half an hour before I told my HC Thesis mentor that I'd meet him to talk about my thesis proposal. I talk to a bank customer service lady and find out that I had a $500 spending limit on my card, like my mother suspected. She helps me get it temporarily raised so I can buy my ticket, and puts a note on my account saying I'll be in Germany from April to July so the bank doesn't go "OH SHIT! SOMEONE'S TRYING TO USE HER CARD IN GERMANY! LOCK DOWN! LOCK DOWN!" (or at least that's how I imagine it would happen). All and all, a successful call to the bank made. A majority of the time, I'm fairly pleased with my service and the customer service people are actually pretty helpful (unless you're my mom trying to buy a new phone. Then apparently they're impossibly thick-skulled).
I hurry off to meet my professor at 11 (yes, it's not even noon yet). We discuss the comments the thesis professor gave me. Essentially, our conversation boils down to: "What you have here is just a regurgitation of information. You need to go deeper. Explore what you don't know." I'm not surprised by this, in fact, I knew the changes that I made were "surface," though that doesn't mean I'm necessarily chomping at the bit, so to speak, to "dig deeper." That "digging deeper" shit is hard. But I resolve to get a white board in the library and do some brainstorming. I make sure to mention to my mentor that I'm going to Germany for four months, mostly so he doesn't think I've fallen off the face of the planet if he can't find me in April. I see his eyes light up in that giddy way language people's eyes do when they hear a foreign language they understand. And then we launch into about a ten minute conversation in German about where I was going and what I was doing, and he told me how he came to learn German. My German was a little rough, but I mostly understood everything he said, and I'm pretty sure he understood me. Afterward, I walked out of his office and send Zan an excited text telling her what happened. It was a good meeting.
After I left there, I still had 20 minutes or so until class, so I went to the public computers in the basement of the OC to book my flight. Apparently, my card was meant to be denied because today my plane ticket was almost $200 cheaper. I booked my flight for $912 dollars, $300 and some for the tickets, $600 in fees. "Welcome to the real world," my dad tells me. I go to my two afternoon German classes and get bombarded with texts again as I hash out my bank calling and ticket buying adventures with my family, and Zan sends me a couple of texts to tell me she packed me food and took it to the Writing Center for me because she's amazing and loves me ♥. When I go to work, there's food sitting in the break room for me.
After class, I go to the library, pop by work to look at my schedule, and tell Amanda, the secretary, I'll be on the other side of the partition working on a white board. I set to work and scribble all over, getting another board when I run out of room on the first. That's the funny thing about "digging deeper," it seems hard when you're first told you have to do it, but then it flows out of your brain from you don't know where like you knocked over a whole pitcher of something staining red and sticky. About an hour later, I've completely re-conceptualized my thesis proposal and I've gone from a literary analysis of Japanese
manga to a case study about Japanese language students and why they study Japanese. And I'm legitimately excited about it too. So thrilled, I pretty much talk to anyone who will listen to me all night, refining and redrafting my proposal. By the end of the night, I've picked Jake's brain over it (my rhetoric work buddy), written a solid new draft and left it on my thesis professor (who is also my boss)'s desk, and e-mailed a slightly more edited copy to my thesis mentor. I didn't get anything I
planned on getting done tonight, but I've gone from a Honors Thesis that I felt lukewarm about, to a proposal I can't wait to get started on.
Overall, it's been two non-stop days. In addition to these two day's events, I've been given a German buddy in Oldenburg, e-mailed her, got a response, received an email from the woman in charge of housing in Oldenburg, and sent her a reply. On top of all that, my apartment-mates and I are trying to get housing stuff together for next year. We have to go on Friday to renew our apartment lease for Fall 2011/Winter 2012 and that's agitated even more emotions and anxieties. But even with that, I mark today off in the "win" column. I got a lot of stuff that needed to be done done, and though I'm not yet prepared for class tomorrow, I feel accomplished.
And so it goes.
