A Series of Unfortunate Events

Hey people,

The eagle has landed. My second post for this blog is written on my bed in my room at Lehigh University, USA. For those who don't know where or what Lehigh is, don't worry, your in the majority. Google it if your that curious. The irony is that I had second thoughts about the university just because I had a hard time telling people which university I was going. But now that I'm finally here, I'm glad I didn't change my mind.

Referring to the topic of my post, my ride to the university wasn't easy. In a nutshell, my camera broke just a week before the trip, I got sick and puked on the airplane (I managed to rush to the toilet of course), left waiting at the head of the line by an immigration officer, had trouble opening my KOPETRO bag at the customs, arrived too late in Bethlehem for check-in and missed the international students orientation.

Top it with the reluctance to leave my family and friends behind, I wonder why am I doing this. But every cloud has a silver lining, and I certainly saw good things coming out of my predicament. Firstly, my camera overexpose the pics that it takes. I had already sent the camera for fixing 6 months ago but the problem repeated itself. It was too late to get a new camera so I resigned myself to not having any medium to record my new adventure. Lo and behold, at the airport, my dad said I can take the family's DSLR!!! Definitely a silver lining.

I have never puked on an airplane before nor have I ever been seasick. I pride myself in being able to weather any conditions without any trouble so it was disconcerting to feel dizzy in the middle of a 20-hour flight and throw up in the lavatory. It did however gave me a first hand experience of how it feels to go through unbearable pain and be powerless to do anything about it. I used to think that migrains are just excuses to skip classes and felt that the migrain does not affect our ability to conduct our daily affairs. My perception was very wrong.

At the immigration at Newark Liberty International Airport, I was next in line to the booth. before me was an Indian couple with their baby. When they were done, the officer got up and left his booth. I thought that he was just giving directions for the couple so I waited for him to come back. Twenty minutes passed and he still hadn't come back. I was cursing under my breath. He could have just told me that he was leaving his post so that I can move to another line. But no, he just left. Myra pointed to a poster in front of the immigration booths: something about them being the frontline image of America. Well, the officer definitely did not give me a good impression. Here, we saw Eno who was way behind us in the original line waving at us from the other side. Cis!

I declared that I was bringing food from Malaysia. Naturally, the customs would want to inspect them. I put all of the processed food into the bag provided by KOPETRO. When I tried to open the combination lock at the carousel, the lock wouldn't budge. I thought I had the wrong bag but but I had confirmed it using thebaggage tag. Not wanting to try picking the combination one by one at the airport after a 20-hour flight, I told the officer to just break the lock. Oh how I wished I didn't bring any food at all. But then again, now that the lock is broken, I wouldn't have to struggle all night turning the dials one by one to find the correct combination. I still am not sure whether I had set the lock wrongly or that I had just received an inferior product. The only way to find out is to pick the lock, using time that I don't have right now.

At Newark, Mr Aznan and his family was there to greet us. I originally thought that Myra and I were going to have to take the bus to Lehigh in the middle of the night but Mr Aznan was there to save the day. We had our first meal on US soil consisting of chinese shrimp fried rice. I was missing my nasi goreng kampung already. When we arrived in Bethlehem after an almost two-hour drive on the 78, registration was already closed so we stayed in a motel. We shared a room with Mr Aznan, his wife and two little kids so we did not have to spend a penny to get a bed for the night (Petronas was going to reimburse him anyway).

In the morning, Myra and I checked into Lehigh. So the adventure begins.