Whelp… we are here... for a little over a week now. And to be honest, it is pretty great. I am sure the Belgrade honeymoon will fade, but for right now I am really enjoying myself. Even more so since I finally discovered that we have internet!
Much to our surprise, when we arrived in Munich for a three hour layover from 7:30am – 10:30am our time… 1:30am – 4:30am US time… after spending 8 hours on the second most turbulent flight I have ever been on… and for those that know Serena… she is not a great flier. It was not very fun. But fortunately, Grayson slept the entire flight. He was really great. Unfortunately, Grayson woke up from a full night’s sleep at 1:30am in Munich. ARG! But don’t worry, somehow his battered and tossed around parents mustered the energy to take him on walks and buy him candy... and hey, I finally made it to Germany, although I only saw the inside of the airport. Hmmm… I’ll have to work on that.
But I digress… when we arrived in Munich we decided to splurge a little bit and purchased web access to check our emails… knowing that it might be a while before we had access again. Whelp, that is when we found out that when we arrive in Belgrade we would not be moving into our permanent housing, we were going to be in temporary housing for up to thirty days. At first we were pretty disappointed. But, you also have to realize that it is quite normal to start out in temporary house so we got over ourselves pretty quickly. The apartment is great by the way. Very roomy… and after a few days I discovered internet!
It’s pretty funny actually. After about two or three days cut off from the world, especially Serena being stuck at home with Gray, with no internet access, I decided that we needed to do something about it and got the ball rolling to try and get connected. Little did I know, it would be easier than trying to schedule an installer to come to the house. You see, in the apartment we have an office, and in this office we have a desk. And when I first looked at the desk I noticed that there were a ton of cables, a DSL router, and Vonage box. I thought it was pretty weird that those items had been left behind and didn’t think much about it… until Tuesday. On Tuesday night, after I had started calling around to get internet service started at our temporary residence, I started staring at all the equipment cluttering the office… and started putting it all together. It had been a while since I had dealt with DSL, but I gave it a shot. And about ten minutes later, we had internet access. It all worked, amazingly enough I hooked everything up correctly on my first try.
So now we have internet. Well, sometimes. It is not the most reliable service… but, we will survive. And via Skype we had the opportunity to call some of our family when the service has been running smoothly.
So, yeah, it is very nice to be connected. And my next order of business was to get the cable and internet up in running at our permanent residence. I heard that it can take up to a month sometimes to schedule a service call and after being in a temporary place for 30 days, I wanted to make sure we had everything up and running before that move. That turned out to be amazingly easy as well. On Wednesday I started bugging the GSO’s office (who handles resident issues) to see how to go about getting hooked up before the move. Well, later that day, the GSO received an email from the guy who is currently living in what will become our house. He wanted to know if the family moving in after him would like to transfer his DSL service into their name rather than turning it off. SCORE! So, we are totally set.
I am going to be getting together with the guy next week to transfer the name and he even invited us over to get a tour of the place this weekend. He will be leaving on November 30th, and after the GSO’s office cleans it up a little, we will be set to move in. So, the good news is that we should be receiving the first part of our shipment (the items we sent Air Freight) in early December and we will be moving into our permanent housing before Christmas. It will probably be January before the rest of our household items and car arrives. But we will survive. All in all things seem to be going very smooth.
-JP
5 DAYS LATER
Okay, so after I wrote this entry and just before I had a chance to post it… we lost our internet access. But thank god for Jasko! He’s a local tech guru that a bunch of us use. He totally fixed us up and we are finally back on line. And because of how great he was to work with, I no longer plan to continue that other guys plan, I am going to cancel it and let Jasko hook me up. It will be much more reliable.
-JP
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