IKEA!

Today I went to IKEA! Susanne continued her tradition of being extremely helpful and thoughtful and brought me along on her shopping trip with her daughters.  I was totally overwhelmed by the size but happily found everything I wanted - pillows, sheets, a comforter, a desk lamp, hangers, a bath mat, and a trashcan - and somehow only dropped 160 Euro.  Great success.

A not great success is the fact that I have no clothes to put on those new hangers.  We got back from shopping at about 3 and there were no suitcases anywhere in sight. So I called Delta again and talked to the most unpleasantly rude person I've ever had to deal with on the phone - and I used to work at our alum calling center bothering people and asking them for money!  The man essentially bitched right back at me about how I'm somehow supposed to automatically know that "industry regulations" mean that Air France, as the last carrier I flew, is now responsible for my luggage.  He then proceeded to offer to find for me the number for the airport I flew into, and became even more agitated when I called him out on the fact that according to what he had just said, I needed to talk to Air France, not the Köln airport...

Vowing never to fly Delta again (joke...my return flight is already set to be booked through them I think) I called an Air France number, where the man was very apologetic (and delightfully French-accented) and checked my phone number and said he would look into it and call me back as soon as he could.  When he hadn't three hours later I called again and discovered they still didn't know anything, although they at least seemed to care.

So, although Susanne had invited me over for dinner again, which would have been fun, I cancelled on her and resigned myself to an hour of searching H&M to find some clothes for the orientation meeting I have next Monday-Thursday back in Köln.  Ironic, no?  And then proceeded to buy all sorts of shampoos and soaps and stuff that I rue using.  And then proceeded to launder the few clothes that I did bring with me that I've already used up.  Fresh jeans here I come!  Also, German laundry machines are disastrously small.  Mom, I promise not to let that become an excuse to wear dirty clothes all the time.

Cross your fingers for my luggage arriving at some point!  I'm moving past the fact that it's so delayed and inching towards a state of terror that it might be lost forever.