On June 1st I recieved my travel itinerary! Spain is usually one of the earliest countries to get that info because there are lots of kids traveling and AFS purchases the tickets as a group. So that's really exciting! I'll arrive in madrid on September 7th with the rest of the kids going to Spain, then I somehow travel the next 650 km to my host city but I don't have information on that part yet. I can't wait to meet my family in person, although I'll be super nervous at first!
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| The flags of regions in Spain |
Today I had my Pre-Departure Orientation as a conference call. For the most part it was fairly basic stuff going over AFS guidelines and support structure, which is good to know, and I did get some good ideas for host family gifts, but it wasn't super exciting and I may have looked like this a lot of the time (not as cute though):
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| adorable baby sloth yawn |
One thing that stuck with me from the PDO was what the AFS coordinator said about how other countries have complained that Americans never know anything about the rest of the world, and don't care. Well, I do care, or I wouldn't be going to another country for a year. I decided that it would be a good idea to brush up on my Spanish history though!
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| not my cutest pic, oh well |
I'm still working on all the visa requirements. There are just so many documents to gather and notarize and apostille and translate and mail and deal with etc. I'm also in summer school taking US History to make up for the credits I'll miss in Spain.
Everything feels so much more real now that there's a date, but I still can't really believe it's actually happening. 80 more days in Austin!
Hasta luego!
