Leaving on a Jet Plane

Hey Guys, so obviously I really, really stink at this whole blogging thing, I’m sorry I haven’t posted anything in ages. But my first month anniversary has already happened and that was when I realized I was just miserably bad at blogging, but I’m going to put up stuff now :) Also, I figure I’ll just do this in little installments so that A) I don’t overwhelm everyone with one super, super long blog and B)I have a chance to actually reflect on everything that has happened to me this month. So here goes nothing!

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“Hey so your plane from Denver leaves tomorrow at 10:08” is essentially what the email I recieved from Tzell (the travel agency Rotary works with) told me when I read it at around noon on the 7th of August. This sent my family and I in a slightly panicked, but organized frenzy as I started final preparations. Before you ask, no I wasn’t as prepared as John Denver when he was leaving on a Jet Plane. My bags weren’t packed, I was excited and ready to go emotionally but realistically I wasn’t very prepared. Hence me being silly and leaving all of my belts hanging up in my room instead of packing them and bringing some things that are probably super useless and won’t see daylight ‘till I unpack them when I get home. Haha anyway, I managed to get my marbles mostly together and one of the last things I did was hang out with one of my friends, Koby :), and we bought her a fish (His name is Norbert) and then I had an absolutely wonderful dinner with my family. It didn’t really hit me then, but in retrospect I realize that that was the last time we will be able to be together as a family for a long time. So I love you guys a lot :) (Also, I hope you are reading this, because otherwise these last few sentences would be worthless hehe :) )
So I’m pretty sure I slept, no joke, maybe two hours because I stayed up super late packing and then got up super early to make it to the airport super early, and Keely and Koby met me to say goodbye, I have the best friends, I love you guys :) I’m not going to lie, I think the only reason I didn’t cry as I waved to my family for the last time is because I was super duper tired and excited.
Then I got sick. Not terribly ill or anything, but just sick enough to make me miserable with a head cold, sneezes, and an annoyingly runny nose. I ran into a former exchange student at the airport and we chatted for a bit. After that, nothing super interesting happened. I made it to my plane from Denver to DC and that was a rather uneventful flight. Then it got interesting o.O I couldn’t find a desk to give me my ticket (I wasn’t able to do an online checkout, and other stuff just wasn’t communicated well, long story short I didn’t have boarding passes prior to making it to the ticket desk at each airport) and I only had like 30 min before the plane started boarding. So there I was, running around Dulles about to miss my plane and then I finally find a ticket booth. Well there was a nice lady at the desk and she handed me a ticket and was like “oh are you an unaccompanied minor?” And being sleep deprived and having a killer headache my poor, befuddled brain answered “yes” forgetting that that is a service offered by a lot of airlines that parents pay for so their children get taken care of etc. and that we hadn’t done that. I thought she was just commenting on the fact that I was going overseas and I was not an adult (oops). So I got shepherded around by that service when I made it to Copenhagen, which turned out to be a good thing, because I would have gotten so hopelessly lost I probably would have missed my flight. I made it safely to Poznan and met my first host family and stayed with them for two days before leaving for Krakow for two weeks.
Looking back, I wish I had had some profound moment on that initial part of my trip; a moment where I was like “Wow, I’m leaving behind everything I know, I am walking out a door and when I return in a year I will be irrevocably changed in some ways. When I return, everything will be the same, and everything will be different” Sadly to say, I didn’t have that profound moment, so I don’t know what that says about me as a person but I was just so filled with excitement at my near future that pretty much everything else in my world was moved to the back burner as thoughts of my trip filled my brain with excitement.