It will be fine. It happened before and I made through it. This time I will survive, too. If this is what happens when moving to a new country, I’ll just take it. Remember last time it happened in 2010 you were so scared but you didn’t want to show so you hid in the bathroom and cried without a sound for 10 minutes with flashbacks of mom packing all the clothes for you and put in a note with all the names and colors of them on the top? Yeah, it couldn’t get worse than that. I mean, you cannot even find a proper restroom for you to do that now. Back then at least you were staying at an inn with a bunch of others who also just came to the states for the first time…

Nah, I was sane enough to keep all the thoughts in my head and put on my best smile and asked the closest identifiable staff I could find by the carousel and said, “excuse me, I didn’t get my luggage. What should I do?”

Apparently this open-ended question didn’t intimidate him, he paused and pointed to a counter to my right, “there”.

No one was behind the counter, “but…”. “That is the place for missing bags”, he said so before I could start the second word.

If I had to name one basic life skill that my motherland has trained me well in, I’d go with waiting. After 40 minutes, finally the staff came. She helped me file a form and told me that my two baggages would be delivered to my place after they found them.

Yeah, that sounds very promising.

I walked out of Hamburg Airport with a single backpack, at least I’ve got an extra pair of contact lens in it.

If you managed to read here, but are still somewhat lost, you shall give us a second chance here.

It was a sunny Saturday noon. Could not say the same for my face.

After 4 phone calls and 3 emails on Sunday, I still saw no trace of my bags, neither from the backyard nor from the baggage-tracing system online. I was supposed to report to the office for my first day of internship on Monday. I had no appropriate clothes in my backpack for that occasion. (My later became-besties cohort/co-intern offered hers if I wanted. Smell of true friendship blooming.) I was still betting that my luggages would arrive just before Monday I left for work.

I lost the bet.

But what do people say? If your bag of internship outfits was nowhere to find, your internship would just got delayed?

Yep. It happened.

I got an email on Monday morning asking whether we could report to the office on Tuesday instead because Monday they were having an internal training.

YES.

And my bags arrived later that day. 🙂

The airliner staff’s voice from one of the four phone calls made perfect sense to me now,

“Don’t worry. It will just be OK.”

One of the first things our supervisor announced when we went in the office on Day 1 was “you can take 2.5 days off every month. And you can save all the days together.” I followed the supervisors’ instructions closely, so did for this one. I put my vacation days together-from July 26 to August 6, I traveled around Europe (well it was just Berlin, Geneva, and Paris but still) with my friend Abigail (who is just awesome).