Packing Day.
Kim put the first load of laundry in the machine at 8 am, and we organized and packed most of the day. I tried to wrap up some email conversations when I couldn't pack.
We had a bit of a problem with the packing. We brought plenty of stuff that we considered as candidates for leaving behind if we ran out of room while packing, so clearly that stuff had to go in last. But we also didn't want to pack four suitcases, a backpack, and a briefcase in Utrecht, taking all day to do it, unpack it all for a week in England, and then spend another day re-packing it all. We set aside the stuff that we wanted to pack last--the stuff we wanted on top where we could get at it easily during our stay in England, our most imporant baggage. Presented like this, you can easily see the deadlock, but it took me a while to realize why I was having so much trouble packing.
Eventually, I decided on some stuff that I would just pack on the outside of one of the suitcases, wrapped up in plastic and tied on with rope. (We brought rope so that we could tie two beds together, but the rope ended up useful for much more than that.) After that decision, the packing went somewhat faster, although it was still hard to find good places to put the breakable things (mostly presents) so that they would not be destroyed in transit. We ended up with more space inside the suitcases than we expected, even without throwing much away. But the suitcases are quite heavy; we bought more books than we expected while we were here. When we re-pack in England, we will not have to tie anything on the outsides of the suitcases.
For supper, we had a spaghetti dinner prepared by another one of Kim's fellow students. Well, as it turned out, we had four completely separate dishes (two spaghetti variants, one Romanian eggs in mayonaise and mustard dish, and one typical Korean dish that we weren't told the name of. Well, almost typical; Uijung added potatoes to tone down the spiciness...