USA

I'm feeling a bit more confident about being ready for this trip. I have done a ton of shopping to get everything that I need to get. Tons of items are scattered around my room in odd, loosely organized collections. Now comes the fun part of trying to get everything into one suitcase! I'm going to attempt to do the thing in which I lay out everything I think I'm packing and then cut it in half. And just hope I don't forget anything important. I usually forget something kind of important like pajamas or a toothbrush. But those things are easily replaced. My computer is pretty important...hopefully I won't forget that. That would be bad. Well, I think I kind of have the hang of this blogging business. I've never done this before and wanted to practice a bit before I get over to France. The next time I write will be for real as it will be the start of my new adventure!

So there is a lot of preparation to do for this trip, even though I will only be going for 4 weeks. I have never traveled abroad for such a long period nor have I gone by myself. I am very excited, though a little nervous, to be living in France for an entire month. I am starting to get a little flustered about the amount of things that need to get done this week. As of now, I have a plane ticket and a place to stay. And that is about it. I need to take care of getting a cell phone or something for while I'm over there, get my train passes or individual tickets depending on what I am going to do, and figure out what I'll be doing when I'm not in class. Since I'm going through my University, you'd think that it would be fairly organized. However, we only had 2 meetings before the school year ended, and I have heard very little about what we need to do to get ready for this trip. I have filled out a tremendous amount of forms already and I'm concerned that I might not have them all done since there have been so many. I finally received information about my host family and where I'm staying. I got an e-mail sent to my host mom (which took an unfortunate amount of time as I was not very confident in my French-writing ability). My family is taking my younger sister to her college orientation this weekend (an 11 hour drive) so my plan is to get a bunch of French language learning cd's things and listen to them on my way out there. Hopefully, this will revive my listening/speaking ability which has decreased drastically since starting college.

This week is the last week I have actual time to prepare for my trip as we will be going away this weekend and then there is another small trip planned once I return. When I get back from that, I will be leaving for France 2 days later. There's so much that needs to be done. I'm so afraid I will forget something important like my laptop power cord or something. That is why I should really make a list of what I need to bring and just keep adding to it as I think of things. If it's written down, I have a much better chance of remembering it. I'm including below the link to the UCO, the university where I will take class.

http://www.uco.fr/