First shopping spree

God put an angel in our path called Hamsa.  I met her on FB and we had chatted on Messenger while we were still in SA.  She gave us so much advice on where to find accommodation amongst other things.  Yesterday she offered to take us on a campus tour and then to a grocery store.  She picked us up at the hotel and took us around campus and showed us where the rental accommodation were.  John took photos and this morning after breakfast, we will be making appointments for viewing. 

As we were going to have lunch and dinners in our hotel room, I had to buy some basics, paper plates, cutlery etc.  Our groceries cost us almost R4000 but I guess it will save us the cost of having to eat out all the time. 

Our next challenge was finding adapters as all our devices needed charging.  So we asked Hamsa to leave us at Friendly Centre which was close to UNCG.  It had an Istore and John wanted to go there to see if he could find adapters there.  She was very concerned that we would be ok but we said we'd just Uber back to the hotel and we would be fine.  We were very happy to see our favourite coffee shop, Starbucks there and enjoyed a good cup of coffee in our new mugs that we bought that has North Carolina on them.  I sat there enjoying my coffee while John walked round to the Istore.  He managed to find one adapter and we needed about 10 between the two of us for our different devices.  We were then advised to go to Best Buy where we didn't find anything.  As bad as things are in South Africa, you could actually find help in-store.  Here, they point you in a direction and you're on your own. We were then advised to go to Lowes, which was walking distance from Best Buy.  We got an extension cable there but no adapters.  Then, on advice, we Ubered to Office Depot, which on our arrival there, we saw was closed down. We decided to go home and take a break and pack away our groceries before going on another search for adapters.  Why we didn't get them in SA, I can't explain. I just never thought it would be such a mission to find them.

On our second trip out, we stopped off at a Walmart Neighbourhood store not far from the hotel but discovered not all Walmarts are equal and this one was more like a convenience Walmart.  So we Ubered to a Walmart Superstore and found some USB chargers at which we decided to buy.  At least some of our devices would be able to charge even though we would need to charge one after the other. I was looking forward to seeing all those weirdly dressed folk I saw on Youtube but nothing caught my eye. Next time maybe.

After all this drama and exceeding my heart steps for the day, I was so ready for bed at 20h00 our time which was a good thing but then someone had moved in in the room on the floor above us and was stomping about like ten elephants with added creaking and groaning of the ceiling.  I immediately fetched my Swiss Army knife (typical coloured) cause for sure somebody was trying to break into our hotel room. We had no idea that there was another level on top of us so we phoned front desk only to be told that most probably somebody had moved in there.  The stomping ended around 02h00, I know cause I woke up every two hours, 22h00, midnight, 02h00, 04h00 and then every hour from then till I finally got up at 07h00 and started blogging.  I hope to God they only stayed one night.

Weather-wise I was very happy to find a moderate 18 degrees celsius on our first two days here but today the max is 12 so it's slowly but surely turning colder.  Everybody says it's abnormally warm for this time of year.  God heard my prayer as I don't like being cold and I'm just being eased into the cold.  It's a good thing I packed lots of winter clothes. 

Getting ready to go for breakfast now and then making appointments for accommodation viewing.  Hopefully, we find something soon in case there's more midnight stomping overhead.

The flight

I never sleep well on flights but this time we had invested in neck rests with cooling gel inside and I actually managed to sleep some on the first leg of the flight that was 16 hours long from Cape Town to Newark.  We had a wait of little over 3 hours for our next flight to Greensboro and we thought that was plenty until we saw the queues at passport control. It snaked from here to hell and gone and would take us much longer than 3 hours.  Luckily one of the ladies asked to see our passports and then took us straight into a much shorter queue which then gave us enough time to stop-over at Dunkin Donuts for doughnuts and what they deemed to be coffee.  It was that bad, we ended up chucking it. When John ordered the coffee, he mistakenly ordered with cream and sugar and I don't take sugar in my coffee, so he had to buy a third coffee which was also chucked.

The flight in the little aeroplane to Greensboro went very fast but by then my arm was feeling it and I couldn't wait to get to the hotel so I could take the sling off and do my exercises. On getting to the hotel, we showered and decided to go to Darryl's for supper as it was walking distance from the hotel.  I ordered the lasagna and John ordered the grill burger at the waiter's suggestion.  We were not impressed with our dinners. I kept on making sums to see what the meals would cost in rands and so I brought my doggie bag home and had leftovers for lunch yesterday.  John wouldn't touch his leftovers he was that disgusted with it.  I wasn't gonna waste good money like that. Waste not, want not, right "-).

By 13h00 our time but 20h00 in South Africa, I was so sleepy and couldn't keep my eyes open any longer.  We fell asleep and woke up at about 02h00 ravenously hungry and we had nothing in the room to eat.  It was a long wait till breakfast which started at 06h30.  On the website it had said a warm breakfast would be served.  That consisted of warm waffles which you could make yourself, hard-boiled eggs in a plastic bag, all kinds of bread, bagels, muffins and even French toast, jams, peanut butter, butter and cream cheese.  Not a tomato or lettuce leaf in sight. My soul needed some veggies so it was time to go shopping.

Madness before leaving South Africa

After a successful year of study, in which John, my husband had applied for student exchange, we heard that his application had been successful and that he'd been accepted to study for the Spring semester at UNCG in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

We gave ourselves one day of celebration and then the serious work of preparing for our trip and stay had to happen in between saying goodbye to family and friends.  John had started working on his proposal and copying and downloading part of the million books he had to read for his thesis, so I started the planning for the household goods to be placed in storage and the house to be cleaned before the agent's inspection.  Our planner stuck to the study wall painted a grim picture of all the deadlines ahead.  It was close to the festive season and cleaning companies were closing down so the latest date I could have was 20 Dec for the apartment to be cleaned.  So the movers had to come and pack up and take everything to storage the day before.  Doing the itinerary was a nightmare as I kept forgetting to add things and we had so many things.

As we would still be living in the apartment till 28 Dec when our flights were booked, we needed to make sure the packers and movers didn't remove everything.  We still needed chairs, tables, picnic set, our cases, cooler box and a few other things to remain behind.  These were all packed into one of the bathrooms and my mom had to make sure nobody went in there.  She made a good policeman.  I was still recovering from my shoulder op and my mom really helped me so much.  A real star.

So with everything out of the house except the things we would still need, we had to buy a blow-up bed to sleep on.  The very first night it went flat twice in the night.  We were so tired and really needed a good nights sleep, so off we went and I wanted two foam mattresses to sleep on but John insisted that we buy two single blow-ups that cost us R1600 each and inflated to about 3cm's. His motto, if you don't have time, throw money at it. The only problem with these was that it was very difficult to get up off the floor with only one arm, the other still stuck in the sling and at my age, I need to get up at least twice a night some nights more depending on whether I had red wine or not.

We had the cooler box to keep milk, cheese and ham in for lunches or dinners and John bought bowls of pre-packed oats for breakfast that just needed boiled water added.  The cooler box had to be topped up with ice every day but it actually kept everything nice and cool and none of our food was spoilt. Most mornings we had this oats but some mornings we went to Mugg & Bean for breakfast just for some variety.  It was one of these mornings that I managed to overturn my cup of coffee which spread over the whole table and Johns laptop was on there.  This caused some water damage and so after phoning Outsurance we went to Somerset Mall to the Istore to try and get a damage report for the insurance company.  Of course, they wouldn't do it as you first need to make an appointment and even though we explained to them that we were flying out two days later, protocol had to be maintained. So the insurance company agreed that we could get the damage report from an Istore in USA and that we would still be covered as claim was made before the cancellation date which was 31 Dec.

That too passed and the morning of inspection arrived.  The night before I had tried to remove the planner from the study wall and it stripped two patches of paint off the wall.  All I could think of was "there goes our deposit." The inspection went well and our agent was over the moon at how well we had taken care of the place.  She gushed over the clean oven, even showing it off to the new tenant.  She kept on saying that she had never seen such a clean stove and oven after five years of use and I used that stove every day, made my honey mustard glazed gammon in that oven often. So at the end of all that, the wall cost us R500 to fix.

On advice from Sarah at Internation Student exchange, we were advised to make copies of all important docs and have the copies certified, which we did.  My friend Beverley, who was also going to take care of our car, was supposed to get a certified copy and we had to have a certified copy with us. She kindly took us to the airport but all three of us forgot about the copies.  Luckily my daughter Beverley, named after my best friend, of course, had come with Randall her hubby and Declan, my grandson to see us off and we could give her the pack of documents to give to my friend.

That ended off two months of intense planning and preparation for our move to Greensboro. 

Never a dull moment.