Everything's normal when... getting there is none of the fun!

Finally.  I'm saying it so everyone else doesn't have to.  Yes, I'm finally going to start updating this blog to tell you the stories of my time abroad.  I will try and make it more interesting as we go, but Blogger's resistance to that neat little slideshow of pictures from my first week may have killed any desire I had to be creatively ambitious.

The beginning of my story and everything that has followed since has not gone according to any plan at all.  I am slowly growing to accept that the unexpected has taken a recent interetest in me, and I'm going to just have to go with it.  In the end things usually work out, but in a way different from the "normal" you would expect.  That is why, sometimes you just have to convince yourself that everything's normal when...

...You don't have your Visa yet?
Some advice for anyone planning to leave the country for an extended period of time in the future: you need a visa or equivalent document to enter a country before you leave the US.  It doesn't matter if the form you need to fill out vaguely indicates that it is possible to apply for your residence permit (type of visa) after already arriving in your desired country.  If you fall for this little trick in the translation, don't fret because you have two stressful weeks of half hour long phones calls (5 minutes of non-hold conversation) with your insurance provider and the D.C. located embassy of your country which only takes visa questions for 1 hour a day.  After all the questioning, scanning of documents, pleading, rescanning of documents, and insisting that you're just as harmless as a real Swedish person, they will glady send you your visa.  And look, it arrived 22 hours before you needed to leave for the airport.  You had nothing to worry about!

...Winter doesn't get its act together until your Visa arrives.
When it began to snow the evening before I left, I hoped the blizzard that shut down Chicago and New York over Christmas would have gotten the airports used to actually having bad weather in the middle of winter again.  The man at KCI ticket registration the next morning kindly informed me that was not the case.  After hearing that my flight would be delayed past the time which my connecting flight from O'Hare to Stockholm would leave on time, my parents and I reasonably agreed to rebook to fly out the next day.  As we turned to leave and were walking out the door, he called out to us saying that he had been able to fit me onto a plane leaving this moment and that I needed to get through the gate.  Rebooking aside, the spirit of adventure swept me through the security check, and I was hustled onto an awaiting plan as my parents nervously waved goodbye.   

...the line to rebook your flight travels a brisk 10ft per hour.
I pushed through the crowd and the man sitting next to me who smelled like muddy nicotine everytime he coughed into our shared air vent when the plane touched down in Chicago.  Sprinting from Terminal 1 to Terminal 5, I joined a group of similarly hurrying people only to be stopped by a airport official right before customs.  She tersely explained to us all that they had decided to close the gate 15 minutes before departure.  That was 4 minutes prior by my watch.  We were then all asked to return to Terminal 1 and stand in line to rebook our flights.  As the wait grew longer and more people were let in front of us "because they were on time for their flights" snapped one attendant, the large group of Swedes before me in line slowly become more vocal and developed stronger and stronger accents when trying to discern what options we had.  Call me a pansy, but when given the choice of staying a night in Chicago or taking a 17 hour, five stop, overnight flight through Europe, I decided to go find a hotel. 

...you remember why no one uses pay phones anymore.
Stranded and in need of a way to book a hotel room, I cast about the terminal for a shop that had change for a pay phone (having left my cell phone at home, because why would I need it? I had thought to myself).  I ended up getting only enough money from a coffee shop tip jar to tell my parents that I had missed my flight.  Now, I'm not sure if it was my natural good looks or my natural look of desparation, but I managed to borrow a phone from another college student and book a cheap hotel room.  The Giordano's I ordered from the room was for my sanity.


The rest of the trip was fairly straightforward and routine, even down to the Swedish Korean baby with cholic on the overnight flight to Stockholm. 

I do have to admit though, the pickpocket signs plastered all over the walls in the Arlanda Airport made me size up a couple of older ladies and a small child on the way from the baggage claim to the bus terminal.

More coming soon.