Feb. 23 - What seems like ONE VERY LONG first day on exchange

So the night before I had to leave, I had some problems packing…so I finished at 6am…and didn’t fall asleep until 7am b/c every 10 minutes I’d remember something that I’d forgotten and then I’d get up to write it down or just do it…slept an hour…woke up at 8am to get ready…at this point I have “stomach problems” (the day of my flight, perfect) and I’m nauseous from not sleeping…and I still had to go to TD Bank, finish packing, and CIBC…so…it was stressful…so I’m at the airport 3 hours early because they told me so…so that I could wait for 2 hours in utter boredom :D

the first flight to washington was fine…short and sweet…the 2nd flight was 8 hours or something and it was nighttime for almost the whole flight…and the guy sitting next to me farted over 5 times in an hour and a half…I stopped trying to keep track after that…and not just that, but they were real stinkers…like breath-thru-ur-mouth stinkers…by the end of the flight, he had farted so much that I couldn’t even tell if the air I was breathing was a fart or not b/c I guess my nose got used to it! aaaaand the woman sitting behind me…everytime I reclined my chair back so I could sleep…she’d wait a while…and then PUSH IT BACK UP!!! ever so slowly…AHHH BITCH! so eventually I told her to stop and she did for the most part except for twice near landing and by then I had given up

sometime during this flight it turned into the 23rd…all I ate that day was a few bites of pasta when the dinner service came around…and I slept maybe a total of 2-3 hours here and there

oh but the best part was that I got to see the sun rise over all of europe from 35,000 feet in the air J that’s a keeper

now after that flight with stinky and bitchy I’m in copenhagen…and I have 15 minutes to run like hell to catch my flight to zurich…which I did run like hell (don’t wear sweaters when flying cuz its wayyy too hot when u have to run with a backpack and a carryon) but the flight was delayed woohoo…but oh there was this weird old guy on the plane who gave me his business card and told me to call him…jenny, we’re supposed to visit him in macedonia hahaha

ok so now let’s say I’ve gotten to zurich…since I only had 15 minutes to make it to my plane, I’d already figured that my luggage wasn’t going to make it onto this flight, which it didn’t. I went to the customer service counter and the lady there said that they had it in Copenhagen and they were going to send it on the next flight so that it’d arrive around 6pm. Ok, so I’m fine with this until I get to St. Gallen and I call them and the guy says that they have located one piece of luggage but they can’t find my snowboard. Sometimes, when you know that someone isn’t fluent in English, you can’t tell whether they are insulting you or whether they don’t mean it. That was the situation with this guy. At this point, I had only slept 3-4 hours in total over the last two nights and I’d only eaten a few bites of pasta yesterday and some instant noodles today at 6pm. So, after this phone call was my first official breakdown L. I got over it a few hours later when they said they found everything.

I was kinda disappointed at the scenery, I guess cuz it was so foggy u couldn’t really see much anyways…but really cute/kitschy architecture and the transportation system is amazing/anal…if a train is scheduled for, say, 930…it’ll get there at 9:28…unload passengers, load new passengers…and leave at 9:30 or 9:31…and ppl get pissed when they’re more than 5 minutes late! but its all really state-of-the-art and fast, clean, comfortable, all that good stuff

They really do have Smartcars and they really do park them in parallel parking spots facing the curb! There’s also graffiti here, but really, it sucks in comparison hahah. I’ll try to get some pictures and then we can compare. I met a dude from England who plays guitar at the train station – he was really nice and explained how to get to the school. Another cool thing was that while I was talking to him, these two Swiss girls who were doing surveys came over and started talking to us. They were all trying to guess where I was from. First was China, then America, and then they got SO excited when they figured out I was from Canada. One of them had been to Toronto and the other one had gone to Vancouver and they both loved it. I’d just had my first situation involving national pride and I was so glad I wasn’t from anywhere else (i.e. the States).

My place is barely a 5 minute walk to school and I really like it. It’s so European and although I didn’t imagine how it would look like before I got here, if I had imagined it, this is close to what I would have expected. My window looks over most of the town and the opposite hillside. Oh, but it turns out that it’s a flat, not a house. The floors are all wood and old and it creaks everytime you move, but that just adds to the charm. I thought that I’d be pretty scared to be living by myself, especially being alone at night, but I’m not at all. I feel really safe. I met one of my roommates, Martina, and this guy that lives in the flat upstairs of ours, Philip. Martina went home for a week though, so I’m alone till then.

ok I’m passing out as I write this and there’s some leftover instant noodle (only thing I ate today) and I don’t wanna fall into it cuz I’d be too lazy to clean up.