Flight booked, anticipation runs high

At the beginning of this week, I booked my flight to Paris. I can't begin to express enough how much more excited I am about leaving, now that the flight is booked. My friend Meredith recently wrote to me, in anticipation of her own trip to Berlin for the fall semester, "Got my plane tickets today! Frolicking together across Europe is fast turning into reality!" She definitely hit the nail on the head: everyday the fact that I'm leaving is getting more and more real to me.


I am very aware of the fact that I am leaving for a very long time. 3 September 2009-15 May 2010 (with only about 2.5 weeks at home in December) is a very long time. I know that I will have a bit of a difficult time with this. First of all, I have two homes that I am going to miss. First, of course, is Long Island, New York, the place where I grew up. I love it here--I could not have asked for a better place to be a kid. Massapequa Park, although not a big, vibrant, and exciting place like Paris, will always be my home, and I will miss it greatly. My family is there and my history is there. For the past two years I have adjusted well to missing this place. Now I need to prepare myself for missing my second home, Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida. This amazing school is just as much a home for me as Massapequa Park is. Sometimes I even feel more at home there than I do in New York. I have the most amazing network of friends at Rollins; it has been a dream come true, considering the types of friendships I have had in the past. Many of those friends will be abroad as well, and we are sharing the same amounts of excitement about our journeys throughout the world--England, Spain, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, Australia, Greece, and so many other different places. I am as anxious and excited for them as I am for myself. There are several other friends who will still be at Rollins too, and I know it will be difficult knowing they are all still together in the place I think of as home, without me. If I could bring everyone I love with me to France, I absolutely would in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, I don't think I can find a suitcase large enough.

On the other hand, I am so ready to get away. I often find myself, eyes glued to the computer screen, looking at maps of Paris, and reading articles about French history, reading anything I can get my hands on that has some remote connection to life in Paris. It's starting to become an obsession. In fact, I'm on my way to having the entire metro system memorized (an exaggeration, of course). I suppose I am a bit too excited to leave.

Still need to get cracking on that visa application...