Now it is about a week until the adventure begins. Or maybe less than a week. When does it actually start? When I board the plane? When I land in San Francisco? When the moving company knocks on my door? I can’t decide really..
The plan for the first time gets more and more nailed down. This is how it looks:
On Monday (Sep 27th) the moving company comes to pack up my apartment. I get to send up to 500 pounds (~227 kg) by air, which takes about a week to arrive. The rest will be put in a 20 feet container that will be put on a ship over the Atlantic. That will take between 40 and 60 days to arrive.
On Tuesday morning my (first) flight leaves for New York/Newark. There I will enter the country and proudly show them my visa so I can enter in H1B status. I got about 4 hours to connect so I guess there will be some time to be bored as well. Then the next flight leaves for San Francisco.
When I touch down in San Francisco it will be a bit past 9 in the evening of an extremely long day (literally!). I will pick up a rental car, hook up my brand new Tom Tom GPS navigator and head for Santa Clara.
In Santa Clara is the apartment I will spend the first month and a half in. It’s in a newly built gated community called 550 Moreland and it looks super nice! Although.. looking at the map you discover that it is 2,5 km from one end of the runway of San Jose International airport. That could be bad but it sounds really strange if they have built such an upscale property without thinking about that…
After a (hopefully) good night’s sleep I have an afternoon appointment with Jane Lee from Dwellworks (a relocation services company) who will give me a welcome briefing and an area tour.
Then I have some days to do whatever until Monday Oct 4th when I will enter the Googleplex as a bewildered Noogler. Then on Friday the same week I hope I can get out of the Googleplex for a couple of hours because then then it’s time to meet Jane again and go looking at some apartments.
That’s most of the plan so far. I’m sure lots of other weird things will happen along the way as well!