Hello! Welcome to my blog! Settle in, grab a cup of coffee. It's nice to see you.
I'm writing this post about 5 days before I leave, and packing is in full swing. The guest room in the house has become a disaster zone, and at the moment current questions to be jotted down to ask my mom in the morning include (but are not limited to):
Do I need ibuprofen and tylenol? And Aleve? And Asprin? ?? ? ? What??
Just how many copies of my important documents do I need to make, and how creative do I need to be in hiding them in various places in my luggage?
What do I do if I suffer a traumatic brain injury and forget all of my Spanish on the plane ride there?
If I have a three hour layover in JFK is that enough time to go get a cupcake from Magnolia Bakery?
How often should I skype Margot? I don't want her to forget me. (Margot is my dog).
...Am I an adult yet?
I'm very, very excited to go to Chile. It'll be a fantastic opportunity to practice my Spanish, make new friends, learn, travel, and push my boundaries. I feel relatively prepared (shoutout to the Carleton Spanish department--thanks to you I finally learned subjunctive, only 4 years after I was supposed to), relatively calm, and relatively nervous. Sometimes I feel more nervous, and then I remind myself that I studied abroad in Israel when I was 15, and I did not die. So that's encouraging.
I'm planning on keeping this blog as up-to-date as possible, both as a way to communicate how I'm doing to people at home who I care a lot about, and also as a reminder to myself for years to come of what I did, who I met, how I felt, and what I saw. Also, perhaps most importantly, as a reminder of all the dogs I petted.
So, if you follow along with me, thank you! I hope you enjoy :)
See you on the other side of packing!
-Nina
