Excess Baggage

Okay, first off, no – I am not coming home in a hot-air balloon. That was (as I am pretty sure anyone would have concluded) an April Fools joke. Sloof Lipra is, after all, no more than “apriL foolS” spelled backwards. It would have been an interesting trip, I suppose; however I am going to be returning (as mentioned earlier) on a Polish steel freighter. Yeah, I know what most of you Americans are thinking; however the Polish people have accomplished much in their history aside from just becoming targets for purely American jokes… Who knows? Maybe I’ll discover a new joke that begins, “So this American boards a ship run by a Polish crew…”

But that’s not what I am going to be telling you, the valued reader (all three of you…), about today. Today I want to share a rather interesting experience I recently had involving some of the luggage that I was needing to get home. And that last sentence is correct – I “was” needing to get this luggage home. I don’t need to any more; and if you read on, you’ll discover why…

Here’s the thing – as I’m sure I have alluded to in several earlier postings, I’ve actually lost quite a bit of weight spending the last eight and a half months over here in Germany. This, by no means, should be taken as a negative review of the German cuisine – far from it … the German food I have had has all been very good (except for this meat-gelatin dish that I accidentally had for lunch once). The reason that I lost so much weight (at least 50 pounds, although I do believe it is more as the 34 inch waist jeans that I purchased to replace my old 38” jeans aren’t quite as snug as they used to be) is a combination of the walking necessary for life over here (I never acquired any sort of vehicle other than public transportation) and my own unwillingness to go through the complications that always arose when acquiring food in eateries where English was not understood. (And yes, I am completely aware that learning German would have been a great thing – and I tried, half-heartedly – however the German language and I just don’t seem to get along very well…)

The way that this relates to my luggage issue is that I actually bought a couple suits (with two pair of slacks for each), something like three sports coats, some shirts and a couple ties prior to flying out here thinking that I would need them for work. I had four suits that I purchased some 14 years ago when working at EDS however they no longer fit the larger Americanized version of me and I donated them to charity before shelling out the $1800 plus for my new wardrobe. Turns out that I didn’t need the new suits – I could have shown up at work in shorts and a T-top and nobody would have even raised an eyebrow… I was unaware of this though and came prepared – a bit over-prepared…

It made the initial trip out here a bit more difficult as I needed to (by myself, mind you) haul two over-packed wardrobes, one rather large and completely stuffed rolling bag as well as an oversized laptop (my 17” screen HP Pavilion dv8000t desktop replacement machine) along with all the little accessories through the Denver International Airport and the Hannover Airport. I got very lucky and, as fate would have it, was able to get picked up in Hannover by my two cousins, Dale and Russ, who just happened to be vacationing in Europe at the time. They were nice enough to actually drive me to the Hotel Café am Park in Braunschweig and even helped me lug all the baggage up the three flights of stairs to my initial room. My trip home is going to be a different beast all together. I will be taking a train from the Braunschweig Hauptbahnhof (main train station – see, that German language is something…) to the Hannover Hauptbahnhof; switching trains in Hannover and continuing on to Amsterdam’s Centraal Station where I will be staying in a hotel for a couple nights before taking either a cab or a ferry to the Police/Customs station in IJmuiden followed by yet another cab ride the final two miles to the actual port where I will be boarding my ship. I think you can easily see that this trip is going to be much easier if my load is lightened a bit…

Due to all the weight loss, it ends up that the money I spent on the clothing prior to coming out here was a waste. Everything that I bought is now way too large for me. Taking this into consideration, I decided that I needed to somehow make it so that I wouldn’t need to be transporting these now over-sized outfits with me on my return trip – that would lighten my load quite a bit. My first idea was to ship these suits home beforehand and just pick them up again at my parent’s house in Allen Park, Michigan. Good idea, huh? Well, here’s how that went…

From all of the information that I was able to gather on shipping large items, it appears that you need to start off by getting large boxes. I packed up all my suits and sports coats into the two wardrobes that I brought with me and then needed to located a box (or possibly two) large enough for me to pack these wardrobes in. But I’m in Germany and have no local support. Where would I get boxes? It’s not like you can just go online and find a store that sells boxes; and, from what I had been informed by Jon who was doing pretty much the same thing for his return trip, the DHL (the European equivalent to UPS) office didn’t have any boxes that were large enough. Last Saturday I decided to just go for a walk and see what I could find…

As it turns out, I ran into what appeared to be the German version of a Home Depot about a mile or so down this main street from my apartment. They’d sell boxes, right? I headed in and started looking … and looking … and looking… I finally found where a couple of cardboard boxes where on display; unfortunately they were way too small for my needs. I then decided to go attempt to inquire with their Information desk. The first question I asked was the standard, “sprechen zie Englisch?” with an obviously negative response. The lady working the desk then made an announcement over the PA system and motioned for me to stay and wait. Shortly thereafter, this guy showed up from the back that spoke a little English and I, once again, went into my charade-talk mode and inquired on whether or not they sold any larger boxes. I got the impression that he understood as he asked me to wait there while he headed off back towards the back of the shop once again.

As I was waiting, another lady appeared and the first lady behind the Information desk motioned her toward me as well. This new lady also spoke a little English and I, once again, attempted to explain what I was looking for as well as tried to explain that there was already a guy trying to help me who instructed me to wait where I was. This didn’t seem to make a difference to her as she then told me to follow her and took me back to a display of these small metal boxes that they were selling. I then explained that I was looking for much larger, perhaps cardboard boxes for shipping purposes. She then began leading me toward the boxes that I found earlier and I was doing my best to explain that they were far too small when the first guy returned with two very large, rather beat-up cardboard boxes which he then gave to me. I asked if I needed to pay for them and it was made clear that I could just take them. Sweet! Although the boxes seemed a bit excessive, I figured I could make them work. I thanked the nice employees and headed out of the store with my found treasures…

So there I was, a mile (perhaps a mile and a half) from my apartment now in possession of two very large (they were folded at least) boxes that I awkwardly hoisted onto my head and started walking to the nearest bus stop. I hopped on the next bus and took it a large portion of the way back to my apartment then wrestled these boxes up the elevator and into my dinky little apartment. It wasn’t until returning to my apartment that I was first able to see what kind of boxes they were. The first one was a huge rectangular box that happened to be missing one very crucial flap and the other was some sort of strange-shaped box that I was never even able to figure out. In the end, these boxes were not going to work. Oh well, it was nice enough of the people to give them to me; however my next move was to drag the boxes out of my apartment, back down the elevator and straight to the recycling bin that I knew of a few hundred meters away…

A large portion of the rest of that day was spent lying in my bed as I had screwed up my back wrestling with those boxes. I’m thinking that I somehow re-triggered the injury suffered when bruising my tailbone in Amsterdam a couple months ago as the pain came back with a vengeance. It started off mild, but as time went on the act of merely walking became a choir. I’m very glad to say that everything got better the next day; but I took this as a sure sign that I don’t want to be lugging all this extra luggage with me on my farewell journey. I guess I am getting old…

Okay, so the box idea was pretty much shot now – I wasn’t about to attempt that again. What was I going to do then? I was thinking I could ship the extra weight back by just shipping the actual wardrobes, themselves; but this is Germany. When you’re in Germany, you follow the rules – that’s just the way it is. I didn’t think that DHL would ship the wardrobes unboxed and my previous attempts to find some sort of luggage concierge service came up with a $600-$700 price tag. There’s no way I was paying that much to ship clothing that no longer even fit me. I remembered visiting a couple second hand shops here in Braunschweig a few months ago with a fellow contractor that was looking to buy a sports coat for the Christmas party. I briefly considered trying to sell the stuff there about a week ago but decided to avoid the hassles of communication that I was sure to encounter. Whilst speaking with my brother on the phone after the box ordeal, he got me to reconsider. He suggested I sell the stuff rather than risk throwing my back out attempting to bring it home. Okay, so my next attempt was to sell it…

Early Monday I decided to remove all of the extra crap I stuffed in one of the wardrobes and took that wardrobe along with all the clothing from the other wardrobe with me as I headed out to the second hand stores. Upon entering the first store, it was made very clear to me that they weren’t interested in purchasing anything from me. They didn’t speak any English; however I clearly got the impression that they weren’t interested. Okay, fine – I’d try the other store I knew of. Different store – same results. The proprietor of this second store appeared to speak English pretty well and I asked him why a second hand store wouldn’t be interested in purchasing damn near brand new suits and he mentioned something about some sort of large corporation that does all their purchasing. I told him that he could have everything (including the wardrobe) for €500 but he wasn’t about to buy anything. Remember, this is Germany- you follow the rules…

Well, what I did next is a bit crazy – I’ll be the first to admit it. I headed back to my apartment, went directly to the room where my garbage is collected and threw away damn near $1800 worth of brand new suits! I kept the shirts as they’re not very heavy but everything else went in the trash. I also kept both wardrobes as carting the suitless wardrobes with me on the trip shouldn’t be too cumbersome…

Lesson learned through all this – never bring more than needed on any trip. After all, at my age, traveling light might actually save my back…

bis später,

Coriolis