Saturday, May 31, 2008

My first time helping friend moving stuff to a new house : Great exercise

Today, I woke up quite early this morning because my roommate told me that his friend is moving to a new house so we decided to help him move all the stuff out of his old one. It was cloudy and raining a little bit this morning. Not long after we woke up, the friend of my roommate called us and said that he was waiting downstairs from the apartment to pick us up to take us to his home. His name is Lakmal, a Sri Lankan, and his wife is called Lenna, and she is an Indonesian. When we arrived at his home, we saw a big truck at his apartment and it was really a big one. So, we went up to his apartment which was on the second floor. As soon as Lakmal open his door, he said, "Guys, welcome to the jungle", which was true: the whole apartment was filled up with boxes, furniture, and all kinds of stuff. We were surprised by the piles of boxes and electrical devices. There, I met another man and he told me that he was called Surash and he probably is a Sri Lankan too. At first, we were very energetic, lifting and moving items, and had a good conversation while working. It is quite funny that whenever I meet somebody and introduced myself, and say that I'm from Myanmar, they all ask me about the cyclone, which I don't know much about. We started from around 7.30, early in the morning; there were countless times of running down the stairs and lifting the goods from the elevator. As for breakfast, I had only had a small bowl of cereal and I could hear my stomach making some noise. I was tired and hungry, too. Unfortunately, while we were moving stuff, we got into an argument with other men. They claimed that they had also reserved the elevator because they were also moving things. Maybe the manager messed up the schedule and this resulted in an elevator fight. However, we did leave the elevator for them but not the loading place, which also made them very frustrated. At last, we didn't want to argue anymore, so we just let them load their things and we just waited. When they finished, it was nearly 11.30, and I was getting more and more hungry by that time. As the apartment was on the second floor, we moved some items by dolly and some, which were light and soft, we just threw from the balcony. This actually sounds very lazy but it worked and saved a lot of time. We took a lunch break and had a delicious meal, maybe because we were starving. Almost everything was loaded on the truck by 1.30 pm and it was not over yet, we still had to move it all to the new house. When we arrived at the new house and started unloading the stuff, every box seemed to be heavier than the previous ones because we were exhausted. However, the truck had to be returned by 4 pm, so we had to rush unloading all the stuff. After taking all the stuff of the truck and returning the truck, Lakmal said he wanted to change the main lock so he bought a key called a "smart key," but I'm not sure. We took off the old door lock and put the new one in, which took us more than an hour and a half to assemble, but we were not successful! Later on, we found out that the door was poorly drilled so the new lock won't go in. After trying to figure out how to put in the new lock, we wound up replacing it with the old one again because again, we were longing for dinner. Nevertheless, that was a great dinner: we had a lot of dishes and sat in the restaurant and had a lot of converstion with each other. Although I was very tired, it was a good oppurtunity for me to have a chance to exercise because I don't usually do any exercise at all. I had a great time and the experience I got was much more than just moving things on the truck.

1 comment:

Don said...

It's clear that you can tell stories quite well in English!

Yes, it is always a good way to be a friend -- and therefore to make friends -- to help someone move. Always, it's a bigger job than you think, and takes more time. But man, hiring someone to do it is always just too expensive.

I used to have a pickup truck, when I still lived in Illinois. I got lots of calls from people about moving -- and lots of meals out of it, too!