A Quick (Eve-of-an-Adventure) Update

Well, it didn’t take me long to break my whole one-post-a-week rule. Whoops. (But what difference does a few hours make? Completely arbitrary; get over it. I’m over it.) I had a longer post planned, but school and my adventurous spirit (line up, admirers) got in the way, and I am just going to make this short and sweet. (Still struggling to write tastes, so I’m not sure if this is going to go as planned ;).)

First, a fun story in which I realized how interconnected we humans are (or maybe just Norwegians and Minnesotans):

After a long week of running into other Minnesotans whom I didn’t already know (three to be precise; I naturally have a note on my phone in which I keep track), I was waiting at a bus stop to head back to my room to get some stuff done. Proudly wearing my Minnesota winter hat (and sticking out as an obvious American), I was approached by a Norwegian girl who asked if I was from Minnesota. “Yeah!” I enthusiastically replied. She responded: “No way, I studied there for a year… But I was mainly on the St. Paul campus because I was studying environmental science.” I was taken aback, as I study environmental science (mainly on the StP campus), and here I am in Norway, 4000 miles away from campus, running into someone whom I have never met before who studies the same thing as me and has done so at the same place that I do so. It was weird. But very cool. I enjoyed talking with her, comparing her studies to mine. And it helped to serve as a reminder to me about Norway’s connection to Minnesota. Neat.

But now on to the reason as to why I’m depriving you, dear reader, of a full-blown blog post: I’m going to London tomorrow! One of the bigger reasons why I wanted to study abroad was to have to opportunity to travel. And with the insane amounts of time that I have outside of class each week, what could possibly be a better usage of time than traveling throughout Europe? So I’ve made a list of the countries and places that I want to see, and now I’m making plans to make that list happen. London was pretty low on the priority scale of the list (oh, yes, there is a priority scale–I love lists!), but I found a roundtrip flight for $21USD, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and going for it! I’ll be there from tomorrow afternoon until Saturday morning. And it was so last-minute/I’ve been so busy with other stuff that it is almost completely unplanned, so I will be planning and figuring stuff out as I go. (Which, as another parenthetical, is SOOO not my style–if you couldn’t tell, I love planning stuff into the ground–so it will be a double dosage of comfort-zone-steppage-out-of.) But anyway, apparently a quick update is 500+ words for me. I need to go to bed. Lame. Expect another post (with photos!) about my London experience on Saturday night/Sunday/soon.

As always, thanks for reading!

-TJS