We're Off! JUST KIDDING.

Welp, nothing beats packing everything up: 6 suitcases, 3 carry on, stroller, car seat, cat, and the family, driving for two hours, checking in for your flight, and then being told by the counter representative that your flight is delayed and you can't make your connection. Fortunately, we have family in the area and a rental car (van) was only $40. Guess we're spending the night and trying again tomorrow! At least this "last day" in the US will be less full of frantic packing and attempting to cram stuff into carry on bags. Our cat is still pissed though.

Two Years in India, Week 92: Farewell Early.

Six hundred forty four days ago, my wife, son, two cats, and I landed in Chennai, in the middle of the night, after 20+ hours of travel, to begin a new chapter of our lives. Everything had changed, new house, new job, new country, heck, new hemisphere. We've had a wonderful time in India and are sorry to leave early. My tour was 24 months long and I originally thought I'd be pushing it to 25. However, my next Post needed me early, so I'm leaving after a mere 21 months. I can't help but feel like I'm "leaving the party early" since most of my friends have 6 or more months left in Chennai.

I've heard India described as "Incredible India" and as "(I)'ll (N)ever (D)o (I)t (A)gain." However, we've recently taken to saying, "India: it's different every time." We'll miss the endless source of entertainment that everyday events here offer through their seemingly random way of getting done. Most of all, we'll miss how friendly everyone has been. As a(n obvious) foreigner, the people in Chennai treated us as honored guests to their country, and we've felt truly welcomed.

Onward to home leave and Buenos Aires, may it be half as much fun as India was!

(PS: The picture isn't actually of me.)

Begin the End (of my time in Chennai)

Ok, ok, so I stole the title from a Placebo song. Honestly though, it's about as happy a song as I feel right now.

My family left India this morning, for the last time in the foreseeable future. They're off to start home leave slightly before I do. We're all excited about our next assignment, but we're also quite sad to be leaving Chennai. Perhaps that's the default state in the Foreign Service: happy to arrive, sad to leave, repeat until retirement. It'll be a hard transition for my son. He'll miss our nanny and (of course) mini-idli with sambar. A few weeks ago, he told our nanny that "we will go to Argentina and [she] will stay in India, but [he'll] come back and visit." Now if you'll excuse me, I have some sadness to wallow in, intermingled with pack-out, check-out, and finally my own departure. Change is hard.

Flying (halfway) Around the World

Departure day started out with good news - namely that the paperwork for importing our cats had come through. While printing it, the manager of our hotel noticed that it was from India and commented that that was his country! He was delighted when he learned we were going to Chennai, since he has family there. It’s interesting, everyone from India that I've spoken to about my posting has immediately said something to the effect of “you’re going to have a great time.” Of course, they've also invariably then said some variant of “It’s really hot there.”

Anyway, when booking our hotels we’d slightly miscalculated the time it would take me to go home to pick up the cats, so we ended up all going. This ended up not being a bad thing, because we had some last minute repacking to make sure all our bags were underweight (Psh, we had like 25 lbs. to spare!). I mowed the lawn for the last time in what I assume will be a long time, we packed up the cats, and started our 24+ hours of travel. 

Things kind of stopped going our way when we arrived at Dulles. We had tried to check in for our flight at the hotel, but the online system had tripped up due to our pets. The result was that my son was checked in… and my wife and I were not. It took about 6 people and 30 minutes for us to get checked in, and even then it was sans boarding passes. We’d have to pick up those at the gate. Of course, if this was the worst thing that happened to us, I’d say it was a great flight. Unfortunately, it wasn't quite that simple.

Our first flights tickets had us sitting separately. Technically, it had my 2 year old sitting by himself… but that didn't seem like a good idea. Fortunately, the singleton seat was an aisle, and we were able to trade a center aisle middle seat for it. The man came to take his seat, which my wife was in, and was perfectly happy to get a better seat (albeit further back in the plane) without the adjacent small child, go figure! The flight to Frankfurt was pretty easy, though our son didn't really sleep at all, which is unfortunate on a red eye. The cats seemed content enough, though I did put them on my lap (in the carrier) for a while to pet them.

Frankfurt is where things got interesting! We arrived at the gate to pick up our boarding passes (keep in mind, the tickets I’d gotten from Travel included seat numbers), where we were informed that the flight was overbooked and we’d have to wait until they could find people to bump to another flight. Hooray… We heard them offer to bump people on the intercom (to a flight that arrived at 8am instead of midnight and included a 600 Euro airline voucher, not bad!), but weren't called up to pick up our boarding passes until everyone else on the plane had boarded. Then they had to clear our cat paperwork, which took a bit of time. They’re very sensitive to not letting people bring animals that aren't pre-approved, because they (Lufthansa) have to foot the bill for the return flight if the animal is denied entry.

Anyway, the flight ended up having 20 no-shows, so the overbooking was moot. We were even ticketed 3 adjacent seats. The cats were a little more stressed out this flight. Side note on cats: while walking around (or sitting and waiting) at the airport, the cats would periodically make their plight of being in a carrier known to everyone within earshot. I had expected that to be a mild annoyance to people in the vicinity, but it actually appeared to have the opposite effect. We were regularly complimented on how pretty our cats are, and many people said they wish they could bring their (or just have a) cat. It was kind of funny walking around with the cats meowing, because people would look around a few times… then spot them and say something like, “I THOUGHT I heard a CAT!”

This post is getting really long, so I better wrap it up. The flight was fine even though the movie selection was much more limited than the previous one. Between the two flights, we both managed to watch “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” which is set in India and had been recommended to us. It was a cute movie and we both enjoyed it. One final parting thought: Why do they serve breakfast burritos near the end of the FRA-MAA flight, when it lands at midnight? 

Pre-Departure Stress

It’s the day before we leave and all the stress of the move is coming to a head. Today was my last day at FSI and the Basic EMT class was pretty interesting. I went through the “departure from FSI checklist” and headed out to pick up my wife and son from the Smithsonian, where they’d spent the day. I dropped off one of my classmates at his apartment, and during the ride we noticed that the rental car’s AC had stopped working. Bummer, I thought, but I’ll be returning it tomorrow anyway. Turns out, I was wrong. A couple blocks after dropping him off, the car completely stopped responding to the gas petal. It would idle, but wouldn’t accelerate any more than that. Fortunately, since it was still moving, I was able to pull out of traffic to a side road. Unfortunately, it was insanely hot, and it took a little over an hour for the tow truck to come get me. Another hour later and I had a new (upgraded) car from Alamo and had somehow skipped out on paying for most of a tank of gas. Probably not worth the time in the sauna… but I guess it's good practice.

Anyway, my wife and son had made their way to a friend’s house on the metro, so I headed over there. We had a pleasant dinner talking about how excited we were to get to India, and how insanely nervous we were about not yet having the paperwork from the Government of India (GOI) regarding importing our cats. With one business day left to get it, we were certainly cutting things close.

I should mention here that the import paperwork is submitted (and generally taken care of) by one of the people in Shipping at the consulate. Without his hard work, this process would have been incredibly more difficult. It was definitely not his fault that things were coming down to the wire. Instead, I blame the USDA. The GOI requires 5 business days to process pet import applications. However, the USDA will not allow the pet to be certified for export until 10 calendar days before departure. Since you have to get your local vet to sign off, and then mail (FEDEX overnight) the paperwork to the USDA regional office (Richmond for us), the process is almost guaranteed to induce heartburn.

Oh well, 48 hours from now we’ll be in India!

Pack Out Panic

This week was an interesting week. Not so much from an "interesting things happened" point of view, but more of a "well that was interesting." So, my experience with moving is pretty minimal. I moved approximately four times in my life. Home to college, college to an apartment, inter-apartment, and apartment to house. I never really had that much stuff until owning a house, and I've never been moved by professional movers. So having people come to my house and box up all my belongings about as fast as I could point them out was quite surreal.

Our packout was split into three days, due to some archaic contracting rules. The first day they packed and drove away our HHE (that is, our slow-boat-to-India items). The second day they packed and took our UAB (unaccompanied air baggage) as well as packing everything for storage, except the furniture. The third day they were supposed to take the packed goods to storage as well as packing and taking our furniture.

The panic in the title of this post came in two phases. The first phase was the insane amount of worry when we realized we didn't have all of our stuff sorted, not to mention separated, in preparation of the movers arriving. This was despite my spending much of the preceding weekend dedicated to preparing for them to arrive. You wouldn't think this would be a problem, but having never done a move like this where the default wasn't "everything comes," we were very worried that the packers would get confused and pack the wrong items, or we'd be constantly rushing around trying to point them to the correct items. However, we did a great job of last minute preparing, and the packers were very patient with us. 

The second phase of our panic came on Thursday, the third day of our packout, when I received a call informing me that the truck broke down and we'd have to reschedule. This posed a problem, since we'd been planning to spend the next week in a hotel in Arlington (close to FSI, so I could avoid the dreaded commute). Unfortunately, this meant Elizabeth would have to be at the house on the following Tuesday to supervise the final clearing out of our house. 

The sudden change of plans rippled down delaying the painting, photographing, and therefore the listing of our house for sale. Hopefully it will sell quickly and that won't matter, but I guess time will tell. It also meant I'd get the 'joy' of another three commutes between home and DC. C'est la Vie... we're almost out of here!

PS: We had 187 boxes of HHE, this is about 15% of them (pre boxing).

Week 14 of Training: SIMOPS Continued

Today marked the end of an era. "What era?," you might ask. Why the era of the IMS core training for the Foreign Service 132nd Specialist Class. Yeah, I guess that is oddly specific for an era. Anyway, we finished up our last day of SIMOPS today. This is a mixed blessing. On the plus side, we're that much closer to going overseas. On the minus side, we have no excuse if we're awful at our jobs... I'm kidding of course, there's always an excuse.

The rest of the week was pretty standard. We had two days of 'open scheduling' when we could spend time with any of our instructors, if we wanted/needed extra training. The other two days we spent furiously trying to remember things we'd learned weeks and months ago. The whole process was pretty relaxed, so I'd hesitate to call it a "final" for our training, but we did brush on everything we'd learned. Tomorrow is mostly a day off; there will be a graduation ceremony for us in the afternoon, followed by some socializing.

For me, today marks my last day battling traffic to arrive at FSI before our 9am start time. Tomorrow I'll leave well after traffic has cleared up, and my last few weeks are full of consultation days and class at Main State. I can't say I'll miss the 2 - 4 hours a day of mind numbing traffic. I was fortunate to receive a parting gift from the commute though: when I went to change my destination in the WAZE navigation app, I received a ticket for texting while driving. That seemed fitting for my last day.

Oath of Office

It's official. I am a Foreign Service Officer. We had our swearing in ceremony today, finishing up our three weeks of orientation. Although we'd already been sworn in on our first day, I guess they like to start AND finish orientation with an oath, to really drive it home. Today's was a much fancier occasion with family invited and speeches from VIPs. Even so, the whole process was pretty quick and we were out in time for lunch. Who cares, I am still officially a Foreign Service Officer!

In case you're playing along at home, here is the oath:
"I __________, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”

Next week the begins my specialty's three months of intensive training. I guess they're trying to tell us something, namely: how to do our jobs!

Last Day at Work

Well the time has come to wave goodbye to my pre-foreign service job.