Monday April 19, 2010

On Sunday, almost everything is closed. On Monday, almost everything opens late, as in 11:00 or even 1:00. Now, under other circumstances, I would be completely sympathetic to just skipping Monday morning like this, but I was more than a little anxious, and I really wanted to make some progress. I finally got to a store called Media Markt, which is a bit like Best Buy: They sell computers, stereo equipment, and cell phones. My plan at this point was to go to my cousin Stephen’s place in Basel, Switzerland, since I was just sort of burning money staying at the hotel and eating at restaurants, and I might be stuck here till June. I’d made contact with him on Facebook, but I wasn’t about to leave the country without some definite means of contacting him.

So I went to Media Markt, bought the least expensive SIM-free ‘unlocked’ quad-band GSM cell phone they had, along with a SIM for Lebara Mobile. The way this works, most of the world uses a mobile phone technology called GSM. In Europe, they use two frequency bands, and some carriers in the US use a third. The very cheapest phones tie you to the two European bands and a single carrier. Since I was potentially going to be stuck for weeks, but surely not years, I thought I might need both Dutch and Swiss pay-as-you-go services, so I got a phone that works world-wide, and you can put in a SIM card from any carrier and get a local number on their network. So I could theoretically even go to AT&T or T-Mobile, get a SIM from them, and use it here in the US. US carriers really like for people to use phones that are locked to their network, presumably to make it harder for customers to switch to a competing provider: You normally sign up for a two-year contract with Verizon and then get a significant discount on the actual locked phone in return. But unlocked phones seem to be very common in Europe. So you see, I had to learn all about the European phone network here…

I bought train tickets on-line. The Dutch high-speed train let me buy it on-line but I was supposed to go to the station and print it there. I have no idea why. So of course I went to the station and the printer was broken, so I stood in line for a good twenty or thirty minutes to speak to an employee and actually get the ticket, when the whole point of on-line ticket sales is to eliminate lines and staff… Then, I got this e-mail in Dutch that somewhere in all of that there was some confusion and they charged me twice for the ticket and wanted to know if I wanted one or two tickets. I was able to translate it with Google and explained that I only wanted one ticket, so they refunded one. But the exchange rate changed by the time they fixed it, so I lost a few cents just sort of out of nowhere… So. I had a ticket for Tuesday morning from Utrect to Basel, Switzerland. The return ticket was much simpler: Deutsche Bahn lets you buy tickets on-line for their overnight sleeper train, and you only have to bring a print out. I had to buy more expensive tickets so they’d be refundable in case I had to change my plans again, but they were still each cheaper than another night in the hotel.

I also made a reservation for a flight home Friday from Amsterdam. That was the earliest they could book me, even considering flying out of Switzerland. Well, technically they had seats available on Tuesday, but very few of those flights actually happened, as I anticipated, and I didn’t even consider those.

Part of the point of going to Stephen’s was that if my flight had to be rescheduled (possibly multiple times) I’d be somewhere sort of safe and not so expensive. I was also going south. I figured if the cloud really did linger for weeks or months, my best bet would be to go to Rome because that’s farther from Iceland and didn’t suffer as much disruption as the rest of Europe.

So my Monday was productive. Then, I went down to the University Museum, saw their collection and garden, took a closer look at the Dom Church, answered a lot of e-mail, and packed.