Day 1..

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I am writing this on the plane, but obviously posting this after all of the craziness of traveling to Zaragoza is over. The first movie choice of the airline is Mirror, Mirror. Not necessarily my first choice. But luckily I have my iPod with the newly downloaded Wonderland Broadway soundtrack and my college essay to finish! Yay! There are so many emotions running through me right now.. I don’t know which ones to write about! So of course, just for a procrastination excuse for you, I will write about as many as I can without completely crashing from exhaustion! Here we go..

I’m very sad. I said goodbye to my parents at JFK around 5 and I thought I would be ok. Turns out, it wasn’t horribly depressing. I went through security after saying goodbye and of course I filled with tears a couple of times but that’s normal! Right? I mean it’s the stereotype that teenagers hate their parents and will do anything to get away from them but I just want to experience something outside of the normal suburbs of Connecticut. And Massachusetts.

I’m so incredibly excited to begin this journey. After all of the anticipation leading up to this day, I just absolutely cannot wait until I can meet with my host mother and begin my residency in Spain!

I’m nervous about making friends and getting along with people, especially with it being such a small school of only 71 kids total, but so far so good. There are supposedly 10 seniors and I have met two others, including myself so far. Everyone seems really excited to get started!

So far, I’m not regretting my decision to study abroad for my senior year of high school. And they tell us that we will probably begin that denial and confusion period about why we decided in our right minds to do this around October. But I’m prepared! Every good and life-changing journey will have its lows at one point or another. So I’m expecting it. Besides, if I wasn’t expecting it I wouldn’t be very normal. Then again what theatre kid IS normal? Maybe next to normal will do (:

An SYAer sitting to my right is a senior, from NH, with blonde hair, who loves acting and singing, who was also in Godspell, who also sang By My Side, who lived in Hong Kong for 2 years, and also loves Wicked to death. Yay, first friend past the usual “Hi, I’m Heather, what’s your name? Where are you from? Oh, really? I go to Westminster. No, I’m not really into sports but I love to swim and I love to act. Yeah, I guess I was gutsy to come as a senior but I’m happy with my choice. Yeah, college apps suck haha sorry, I don’t want to sugarcoat it.” I made friends with one of the stewards; he was talking to me while I waited for the bathroom. He was very surprised at the fact that we were all high school students because we look like college students and we had a lovely chat about airline food. Which really wasn’t all that bad! The food, I mean. But I guess the conversation wasn’t, either! I also made friends with the girl sitting to my left after I offered her my uneaten snicker doodle cookie. Not really my favorite, so why bother with the extra calories? She just finished high school last year and was visiting her dad in San Diego because she lives in Israel. Next month she will joining the Israel army for two years, so as she put it, “No studying for me for two years!”

So that’s it for the plane ride. Next, we will arrive in Madrid around 8:30 am Madrid time and we will load onto a bus and drive for about 4 hours to Zaragoza where we will finally meet our host families! Loooooong day. And it’s only just begun!

On a final note for now, I mean how great is Ingrid Michaelson?! Combined on shuffle with Wonderland is an incredibly motivational playlist for writing this post and a college essay! Highly recommended.

I am now updating you about an hour from Madrid, even though this is all one big post. I am now more excited than sad, which I find to be helpful considering its 1:38 AM CT time and 7:38 AM Spain time. Eek. Luckily, I was able to sleep for roughly threeish hours while some random NBC clips and a movie about a baseball team played. (Clearly I wasn’t paying enough attention to them because my eyes were closed and I was dreaming about when this plane ride would be over! Not nearly the longest flight there is, but it’s the longest flight I’ve been on. Luckily, all of the children in the seat behind me slept the entire time! So no screaming babies, sorry dad. I know you had your hopes up that there would be one screaming for 7 hours straight (:

Before I say adios for now, is it really a thing now where people take the complementary blanket and sleep with it over their heads like one big snuggie that goes over your face? I don’t understand the motivation to do so..