That's a Laugh

Do you ever have one of those mornings when, after only being awake for an hour or two, or even a few minutes, you realize that you should probably just go back to bed and start all over tomorrow?

I've had one of those mornings today.

It probably has something to do with the fact that I woke up around 3am and couldn't fall back asleep until about 4:30, only to wake up three hours later.  My inability to make more than a single cup of coffee at a time doesn't help my disposition either. Whine, whine, whine - but the truth is, it really has been a rough couple of days for me for a lot of reasons that I won't delve into here, mostly because it just isn't worth it.

We went to an appointment at the bank yesterday evening to apply for bank accounts; Patrick left with his set up, and I am not even close to having one (a long, convoluted mess of a story, like just about everything else here).

As we were leaving, I asked the bank employee a question:
"Have you ever moved abroad?"
[pause] "No," he replied.
"Don't," I said, without a moment of hesitation.
He laughed heartily, and we chuckled along, but I wasn't kidding in the least.

Moving abroad has been the biggest pain in the butt I've ever experienced. I'll talk about the reasons why later, but let it suffice to say that NOTHING about moving abroad is easy. Nothing. Is it worth it? I'm sure I'll say it is later, but I'm not quite at that point yet. I'm outrageously human and slightly bitter. Just give me time.

The days are long and overwhelming and completely frustrating, especially in the beginning, but it is getting easier to go about our day-to-day business without more than one or two catastrophes. However, there are plenty of moments every day where we just have to laugh because things are so ridiculous.

So often do I find myself saying, "It's always something. It's never easy. Why can't ANYTHING be easy?"

Yet we laugh, because we have to survive - somehow. My dear friend Grace was the first one to tell me, so long ago, that sometimes you laugh just to keep from crying, and I cannot tell you how many times that has been true for us thus far.

What can you do when, at the end of a long, tiring, confusing, overwhelming day, you're just trying to flush your stupid toilet and you don't know whether it will take 1 or 5 flushes for something to happen? (True story, folks.) You laugh.
What can you do when you try to get to the grocery store with just you and your memory, get lost from the get-go, and just end up walking a really ridiculous, backward route to your destination? (Again, true story.) You laugh.
What else can you do when you get lost inside your own apartment building? You laugh. (Keep reading for more on that...)

Laughter is the best medicine, after all, and sometimes it's all you can do to keep from crying. So we laugh.

- - -

Now, I have a little story for you, because that's just what I had to do yesterday morning. I just had to laugh.

Tuesday morning, September 29th, 2015.

Patrick left for school at about 6:45am, and at 7:00 I was totally awake. Because I enjoy my mornings best when they are slow, quiet, and undisturbed, I contemplated getting up to make myself coffee and breakfast; however, I put my sleep mask back on and fell asleep (I have to wear a sleep mask because I can't sleep if the room isn't pitch-black, and there is so much light that comes through our window from the apartment complex's parking garage below us).

I don't sleep well at night here for a lot of reasons, so 8:30 came along while I happened to be dreaming that a ginormous, furry spider fell out of my shorts (I don't even begin to question my dreams). During the midst of this slightly-traumatic dream, I was suddenly thrown out of this deep sleep by someone ringing our flat. There's a phone-type system where someone at the outside door presses the number of your flat, and there just so happens to be a phone in our bedroom which you can answer and/or open the front door. This phone is RIDICULOUSLY loud, folks. I swear to you, it could wake the dead.

So here I am, in the middle of trying to figure out whether or not I have been bitten by a poisonous spider that fell out of my shorts, and this death-defying alarm rings, shoving me out of my sleep, practically making me jump out of my skin. I hesitate, not sure if I should answer it because I'm not really sure if it actually happened, and then it hit me - my mom's package should be arriving today! I throw myself out of bed and lunge at the phone.
"Hello?" Groggy. I'm so tired.
"Delivery," a muffled Indian voice tells me.
"Yes, I'll be right down." Hang up.

Stupid. So stupid and tired was I that I didn't remember the fact that I was locked inside the apartment. We only have one key to share, so I had to ask one of my roommates to open the door for me. But first, I HAD TO GET DRESSED.

Now let me give you a bit of a picture to go on. I am completely drowsy and feel drugged at this point, because I am nothing remotely close to a light sleeper. My hair is greasy and matted because I planned on washing it the night before but put it off until that morning. I'm in my sleep shirt (which is super cute, by the way), but golly I need pants! And shoes! I scrounge around the room knowing that my black pants from yesterday are somewhere. I find my pants, turn them right-side-out, pull them on, scrounge around the closet for my black Toms, and slip those on. Oh, and I have my big, thick-rimmed glasses on my very sleepy, acne-ridden face (not one of my favorite parts about moving here).

So I come out of my room as described above, and I realize that I've just come out of our room with my shoes on. I stop and contemplate taking them off, remembering that our landlady prefers us to only wear our shoes in the entryway, but I shook that thought away because the delivery guy was waiting. Who knows, he might leave! With my package!

I lightly rapped on Gustavo and Ursula's door, and Gustavo opened it. He took one look at me and was clearly confused. Somehow, I mumbled out the gist that Patrick has the key and there's a delivery downstairs. Everyone knows that we're waiting for my mom's package, so he understood immediately. He then asked me why I didn't just let them up, but to be honest I didn't even know that you could do that; I just said that I was asleep and didn't think about it.

Gustavo opened the door, and I raced into the hall and tried to find the heat-sensitive pad to call the elevator. The large metal doors opened, and God only knows what buttons I pressed... I remember thinking, "I'm not sure if I pressed the right buttons," but I shrugged it off and got out when the doors opened.

Oops. I was definitely not on the right floor! As I exited the elevator, I lunged through the small hallway and opened the door that would normally put me at the main entrance/exit, but I had no idea where I was. Guys, I was so groggy. I lunged back into the hallway, looked around, still had no clue what floor I was on, got back into the elevator, then quickly realized that I had no idea how to get to the ground level from this floor (it should be mentioned that this is a really, really weird elevator and I hardly know how to use it). I got back out of the elevator, looked around, and decided to just take the stairs down. Now, we live on level 2, so I thought I would just have to go down one flight of stairs... I went down three before I arrived... I think.

Whatever. I SEE THE DELIVERY MAN!! I raced through the door and down the last set of stairs, but I didn't see a box. No matter, it's probably around the corner of the doorway where I can't see it. I pressed the bulbous green button and opened the door. Of course, I immediately apologize to the delivery man for the wait because I have no earthly idea if this man has waited seconds or minutes for me since I answered the phone. Still, I see no box. Then, as he is finagling the electronic signature thingymajig, I see it... an envelope. Oh, no. He hands it to me. It is definitely something for our roommate/landlady Shane. Sigh. I started to sign, realized that I was signing for something that was not mine, and got all squiggly with my signature.

As I walked up the stairs, I looked at the envelope. It was clearly some sort of passport. What a bust.

Because I was a bit more clear-headed at this point, I was able to get back to our apartment without getting lost. After I walked inside, I went to the living room (where Shane lives/sleeps), and called out to her. She's an adorable Taiwanese woman in her late 30s, but she looks at least a decade younger than that. Shane has been sick, so her accent was even more adorable.
"I think this is for you."
"Oh, thank you! I think this is my passport. I have been waiting for it. Thank you!"
I smiled. "Yeah, no problem."

Oh. My. GOSH. I went back to my room, shut the door, and collapsed my grease-ridden, groggy, exhausted self onto the bed... and I just had to shake my head and laugh.

I swear to you, this could have been an episode of Friends. Picture it: the angst-ridden, homesick Rachel is waiting and waiting a package from her parents to arrive. She is in the midst of a deep sleep, is thrown out of bed by a delivery, tumbles her way to the front door, gets the package, realizes it isn't for her, comes back to the apartment, and gives it to a sickly Phoebe who has been listening to Rachel go on and on about how excited she is for this package to arrive from her parents. "Oh, thanks! I've been waiting for this!"

I'm telling you, my life is turning into a sitcom. Hah!

- - - 

To end this post in good fashion, and to do a bit of documenting, I'll conclude with a few photos from our journey where we - you know it - just had to laugh. Enjoy. :)

Our first day in Birmingham with my saint of a mother. We were completely lost at this point and just wanted to find dinner.

The mess that is public transportation. My mom and I were heading from Birmingham to Dublin, and the train/ferry tickets came out in a jumbled mess. We had NO idea how in the heck to sort them! We figured it out eventually, but reading, sorting, and following them wasn't easy since we hadn't seen anything like them before. Whew!

Public transit in Dublin was outrageously confusing and we never actually stepped foot onto a bus there. We just said, "Forget it!" and resorted to taxis or our own two feet for the whirlwind trip. Haha! Oh, that bus system was such a mess.

This one makes me laugh every time I look at it! We were in Wales on our way back from Dublin with a couple of hours to kill before our train arrived, so my mom and I decided to explore Holyhead for a bit. Here, we were at an ancient Roman fortress, begun in the 13th century, that eventually became church grounds and a school... and my mom stepped in some dog poop on our route there. She was so irritated, but I couldn't help but laugh, and this was the first spot of grass that we saw. When I realized where we were and that she nearly scraped off dog poop onto someone's grave, I nearly lost it! I couldn't help but laugh!

Okay. Both train trips to and from Dublin were... interesting. Now, this is no bash toward the Welsh people, but in this instance it was clear to see why the Brits have not held back in proclaiming that everyone around them were/are uncultured. I'm telling you, the majority of our train trip through Wales was spent trying to ignore the people around us and suppress our raised eyebrows.

The trip to Holyhead was spent with a man who was clearly mentally unstable. It was funny at first (we have our fill of crazy in our family so we're all-too-familiar with it), got uncomfortable as he and his dog "Dottie" (who he talked to constantly, rather loudly) were causing trouble, and then we had to laugh by the end of it because even the other passengers were having a tough time surpressing their chuckles. It was ridiculous.

Our trip from Holyhead was on a Saturday night, and boy was that a mistake. We noticed that people were dressed up (if that's what you can call it) for what looked to be a night out on the town. The closer we got to civilization, the more lively the passengers became. By the end of it, the majority of the train was drunk-drunk-drunk and conducting a really terrible session of karaoke. We just had to laugh. I almost punched one of them, though, when he walked up and down the aisle putting his hand on everyone's head - he got my mom, but he tried to touch me and my bitch face scared him away (sorry, that's the only good term for what it is... and I have a good one). We got into Birmingham after 11pm and just had to laugh as we relayed the events to Patrick!

Oh, Stratford-upon-Avon. Patrick and I found this overgrown public footpath as we were on our way to Mary Arden's farm... to which we never arrived. The maps were not helpful, the street signs were non-existent, and the sidewalks disappeared. "This is dumb!" is all I could say, but then we had to laugh at how hungry we were and how ridiculous the situation was. So much for finding a quaint spot to eat our lunch, and so much for Mary Arden's farm!

I just have to laugh and shake my head when I see this picture! This was taken in our last hotel room, about a week and a half before we got to move into our room in our flat. The sun was shining, so we had the curtains open, but the mirror on the wall was shining the sun directly into Patrick's face as we sat on the bed watching television. What did he decide to do? He grabbed those aviators, baby. Ha!

There's a whole post coming in relation to this, but WHAT IN THE HECK kind of soup is this, and WHY must you name it something so suggestive and ridiculous?! There are so many things like this that we have come across, and I just have to laugh like the child that I am every time! 

Tesco. The UK version of Walmart. Apparently they don't understand what "Open 24 hours" means. It took us a while to figure this out, but they're open 24 hours a day Tuesday-Friday; Monday 6am-midnight; Saturday midnight-10pm; Sunday 11am-5pm. Weirdest. Hours. EVER. I can't help but laugh at how ridiculous this is!

We had to purchase towels, and this is the label that is on them. I just had to laugh!

Patrick carrying one of our three trips across town as we moved from the apartment we stayed in for a week to the room that we are currently renting. THIS is why I miss my car, people! I just had to laugh and take a picture of him, but it's a bit blurry because my hands were full as well...

...with this. OY, I do not look forward to moving like this again, but in the moment, you just have to laugh.

When you try to move your drying rack into the sun and it collapses, ruining your careful arrangement and spewing those wet clothes all over each other, you just have to laugh!

:)