10 Feb Cya Sydney

Unoriginally, the start of my journey here was stressful and almost disastrous. You hear stories like that all the time: my bags were too heavy, I couldn’t find my passport, I almost missed my flight, etc. My experience was no different.

It started off with the baggage dilemma. I had two bags, one a massive suitcase and one a smaller duffel bag that I’d be able to take with me if I got the chance to do weekend trips away during the semester. I’d tried to pack so that most of my heavy stuff was in the smaller bag so the weight would kind of be distributed evenly between the two, but without proper scales I couldn’t actually tell how heavy either bag was. So I get to the airport and I line up for 20 minutes, meanwhile stressing that my Dad’s flight from Tasmania will be delayed and he won’t make it to the International terminal in time to say goodbye. It’s finally my turn and as soon as I put my big bag on the scales I know I’m screwed. It’s well over the allotted 23 kilos per bag, and the check-in lady just looks at me like I’m an idiot. I hand her my passport and start the awkward bag reshuffle that you silently laugh at when you see other people doing it at the airport, but you never think it’ll be you. A few reshuffles and weight checks later, and I finally did it. My big suitcase sits at 23.3 kilos and the check-in lady lets it slide, seeing as my smaller bag is so full that if I tried to re-juggle anymore it would burst.

Then we hit another snag: the check-in lady looks at the start date of my visa (the 16^th of January) and doesn’t think I can legally arrive in the United States before this date. I’m in full on stress mode by now: I know in my mind that we have been told to arrive in San Francisco at least a week before orientation to get our bearings, but according to this woman I won’t be allowed to. A 30 minute phone call to the US Embassy later and she is satisfied that I have a 30 day grace period before my visa start date to enter the United States, meaning I can, in fact, get on my flight. She finally checks me in, my bags go through, and all I have time for is a quick bit of sushi and a barely-long-enough family hug before I am headed through customs, completely on my own. I’m still a bit shaken and I don’t even look at anything in duty free, too eager to get to my gate and make sure I don’t miss my boarding time.

Thankfully, my flight was smooth and uneventful, I even had an empty seat next to me so I get to stretch out a bit on the direct 14 hour flight from Sydney to San Francisco. It didn’t hit me until I was waiting at the baggage carousel on the other side that I was actually doing this, that I’d just packed up my life and moved to America for 6 months. And my jet-lagged drunk mind couldn’t have been more excited.