Exactly a week out from bidding loved ones adieu and jetting off to Europa and feelings are mixed.
Elation at the thought of my long-awaited European adventure finally coming true and continuing consternation at my lack of packing are the main two.
It's not pretty... yet
That and a small but unshakeable feeling that I’m going to stuff things up. That sometime during the six weeks I’m abroad I will:
- miss a connection and be delayed for hours
- offend a foreigner in either their language or mine
- pull a ‘Little Match Girl’ stunt a la Hans Christian Anderson and die freezing and delusional in the snow.
- or, alternatively, not see any snow. *
[*Note: If a continent insists on having below zero winters year in and year out, the least it could do is accompany its general greyness and misery with some sprinkles of frosty fun, no? My only alternative will be to cry in the open and see if my tears make snowflakes. I accept they’ll probably just freeze painfully to my face.]
The idea of doing Europe ‘wrong’ is a silly but inevitable one when you’ve hyped a trip up as much in your head as I have. The fact that I’m travelling alone for most of my trip compounds the fear because I’ll lack someone to bounce ideas against for the best-looking routes from Vienna to Paris and the best-looking foreigners from Vlatna to Pierre.
That said, staying with family for the first few days in England before skipping over to the Czech Republic where I’ll spend three weeks with the same 25 people should chase my misanthropish misgivings away pretty quickly.
To distract me in the meantime, I’ve been keeping myself busy by not packing, downloading Skype so I can keep in touch with the fambam, leafing through my increasingly impressive collection of Lonely Planet guides and attempting to learn the unreadable and unpronounceable Czech language with the help of an infuriatingly smug voice that comes out of an iPhone app.
Thanks to the Aim Overseas gang for my oh-so-pretty guide to Prague!
So, na shledanou for now.
I promise not to upload pictures of clouds taken from my plane window if you promise to Czech back next time.
x Jam
Jamesina is participating in our January 2012 International Law and Human Rights program at Masaryk University, Czech Republic. Jamesina is going into her 4th year of a Combined Bachelor of Media & Communications (Journalism)/Law at the University of Technology Sydney.
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