A Summer of Bliss and Things I'll Miss

5/26/14

School has ended, and with it, so has a decent amount of motivation. After an exhausting--though rewarding--freshman year, it's hard to make myself do anything other than lounge around all day (see: "All the other kids are doing it!). Still, I know that when it comes to, among other things, studying abroad, you get out of the experience what you put in. So, with that, it's time to blow the dust off of my Icelandic textbooks and get cracking once again.
As for "Things I'll Miss", the reality of studying abroad is beginning to hit me: there's a lot of things I'm going to miss out on. And while that thought is difficult to accept, it makes me value the experience that I'm having in place of the alternative even more.

5/12/14

Forgot to mention: I'm going to try including more pictures with these posts if at all possible (or relevant), which is something I've been meaning to do for a while. Here, as a sample, is a picture of the crescent moon I took at my cousin's wedding about a week ago:

(It was prettier in person, but you get the gist.)

Can't Wait to Go and the PDO

5/12/14

I'm a little late writing about it, but the PDO (pre-departure orientation) was a super positive, motivation-boosting experience. There were 5 other students studying abroad next year from Georgia, and their destinations were all warmer than mine (Italy, Ghana, Costa Rica, Turkey, and Brazil).. Everyone's attitude upon hearing someone's destination was more along the lines of, "Oh, that's so cool! What have you learned about [insert country]?" rather than envious or competitive, which was really nice. Also, something I was unaware of beforehand was that our PDO was the students' who came to the US this year's pre-return orientation. As a result, I got to meet people from Thailand, Norway, Germany, Denmark, Australia, and Turkey. They were lovely as well, and their English was phenomenal--not surprising considering how far behind the US is in teaching foreign languages, but I was still in awe of their fluency. 

So, yeah! Hopefully I've made some new friends, but if nothing else I learned a ton and had an awesome time. Now if I can just get through exams for a week, I'll have all summer to daydream about my upcoming adventure.

Dressing Up and Coming Down (...with some sort of illness)

5/4/14

Sorry for not updating in a couple of weeks, though it's not out of laziness. The only AFS-related event coming up is the PDO this Saturday (which I will be sure to document extensively). 

Regarding the title, I traveled south this weekend--4 hours south, in fact--for my cousin's wedding. While I thoroughly enjoyed visiting my relatives and the vineyard where the ceremony took place was lovely, I'm feeling kind of under the weather today, and I'm not really sure why. Could just be exhaustion from the 8-hour round trip and having to get up early. Anyway, I bring this up b/c I'm hoping travelling by flight won't have the same effect. Fingers crossed.