Goodbye Northern Hemisphere

Here is the scene:

It is the night before my grand departure to Chile and I am sitting in a sea of my own clothes, mixed with toiletries, electronics, and multiple nonsensical items that I can’t imagine spending five months without. What am I doing here? Let me explain:

To put it simply, I am heading off to Valparaiso, Chile to study abroad for five months. I will be there until December 18^th as part of the Institute for Study Abroad-Butler’s Chilean Universities Program,Valparaiso, and in that time I will attend classes at the Chilean university Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso (PUCV), or at the Universidad de Santa Maria (USM). The other 17 students and I will stay with different host families in the town just outside of Valparaiso called Viña del Mar.

Valparaiso

Viña del Mar

I have never been away from home for more than ten weeks (the length of a quarter at the University of Denver), and have never spent more than ten days outside of the country, but here I am, looking at five months’ worth of stuff. It’s difficult to even know where to start! Everyone says that you cannot overpack for this trip, especially because you are going to end up bringing back twice the amount of luggage you arrived with. Looking at everything laid out on the floor, it seemed so reasonable—of course I needed that “Kiss Me I’m A Longhorn” t shirt, and I can’t get by without both a red and coral cardigan because they’re just so different—but once I started putting things in suitcases it was as if everything mysteriously expanded. Lucky for me, I have an incredibly practical (although sometimes painfully so) mother who does an excellent job at reigning me in. She also excels at rolling her eyes when she realizes that she is going to have to pack my suitcases for me.

Please don’t get the wrong idea: I am not completely incompetent at preparing myself to go abroad. I did successfully go through the entire process of applying and acquiring a student visa, which, if you are interested in this fascinating bureaucratic process, went something like this.

At this point, I am at the airport watching passengers leave the plane that will fly me to Dallas where I can catch my flight to Santiago. There was definitely a packing frenzy in the last hour, but at this point, my hair is cut, my bags are packed, copies of important documents have been made, and I have Tina Fey’s Bossypants tucked under my arm.

 

Here goes nothin’.