Seven more sleeps until I board a plane bound for London! I feel like a little kid again in the days leading up to Christmas.
As uni went back last week my mind was far from thoughts of Sydney lectures and tutorials. Instead, it is racing with the prospect of a semester overseas.
With only a week to go, I’ve got the basics of my exchange to the University of Stirling in Scotland sorted. I know where I’ll be staying and what classes I’ll be taking. At the moment, it feels like this pending experience is a cluster of dots on a page and that my life for the next five months is mapped out with semester dates! I’m hoping that this incoherent mass will take the form of a giant connect-a-dot and lines will appear with the people I meet, new things I learn, different places I go and no doubt the huge amount of fun I’m in for.
I realise that the likening of my state to a cluster of dots on a page may not inspire the kind of confidence in you long-suffering readers that I was after, so how about I compare my feelings to that of a Mr Squiggle drawing? Oh dear, that’s probably not much better. Either way, when you step into something new you don’t have familiar routines, people or places surrounding you that form part of a bigger picture. Change always brings with it the unknown and while everything is a little daunting now, I know by the time I finish up in Scotland those dots will be lines and I’ll have a new finished picture of my own!
I don’t know who my flat mates are, just how cold and rainy it is going to be over there or how I’ll be feeding myself. I wouldn’t be able to tell you how to get from one class to the other or where everyone hangs out on different nights of the week. There is so much I don’t know. However, I have no doubt, that within one week I’ll have, fingers crossed, at least six new friends in my flat mates, have come to terms with the miserable weather and had some hearty, if not a little sketchy, self-cooked meals. Hopefully I also will have found the way to all my classes and experienced some of the partying every exchange student, back from anywhere in the world, seems to rave about.
So really, it’s not looking too daunting after all. Right now, all I can do is imagine what this picture of mine will look like at the end. I have a feeling it just might end up a self professed ‘masterpiece’! All I have to do is go along for the ride while it takes shape. Things are looking mighty good. Until semester starts in mid September I have six weeks of wandering around Europe to look forward to. Holland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Croatia, here I come! Seven more sleeps… the countdown’s on.