This has been quite the journey...

NOTE: so I wrote all of this before I got to Trabzon. Now I’m happily there with my amazing host family and I’m soooo soooo happy and I love it here so much, but I’ve had quite the journey trying to get there…


Sometimes I love traveling. I love the “getting there” part - the “in-between”; not so much. After arriving in New York for orientation (which was very exciting!) I felt like the long journey was off to a good start…however, it has ended up to be quite a disaster.


Orientation lasted from Tuesday afternoon till Thursday evening. The NSLI-Y kids had orientation for an extra day compared to the Spain, France, Austria, South Africa, and Switzerland AFS students who arrived the next. As for NSLI-Y participants, it was Turkey and Egypt. We all bonded and had a lot of fun! By the end though, my group going to Turkey (10 students all together from the entire USA) was the last group to head to the airport…which was somewhat frustrating, but hey, it was fine. Or so I thought.


Our first flight from New York to Washington, D.C. went fine - but once we landed in D.C., we had a delay that kept continuing to get put off more and more. Our connecting flight from D.C. to Germany was very tight but we all figured we would be fine and make it. Well, once we landed we had probably 5-10 mins to get to our gate. We all SPRINTED about a mile and a half, carrying heavy bags and all, to find out we had missed our flight to Germany by four minutes. Yes, four minutes. Despite us all being incredibly sweaty, tired, and pissed off (or at least I was) - there was nothing we could do. We ended up staying the night at a hotel and planned to tour D.C. the next day, considering the only available flight next to Germany was at 10pm the following evening.


Touring D.C. was not fun. It was hot, and we were all still very tired - but excited to know we would be on our way to Turkey soon. The flight to Germany went very well, and much faster than I thought. We had our flight to Turkey about an hour after we landed. I was so excited...SO excited...to know that we would finally arrive in Turkey within three hours and start on the orientation we missed there. Well, come to find out, the flight we were SUPPOSE to be on is entirely booked. So here I am, stuck in Frankfurt, Germany, pre-writing this blog considering I can’t connect to internet and our flight to Turkey isn’t until 10pm tonight. And hopefully nothing goes wrong with that. But to top it all off, all our luggage isn’t even here. So it’s probably lost somewhere in Europe…who knows. I can’t believe airlines do this to people. Honestly, I know worse things can happen, but this is the most frustrating thing for me right now. All I want to do is be in Turkey, happily. Also, I’m assuming we have flights tomorrow (Sunday) to our host families. But considering we’ve missed all our orientation in Istanbul and now won’t be getting there until 2am, are we even having orientation? Or are we delayed getting to our host families? I have no clue. Despite all the negative aspects of getting to Turkey so far, I love my group. We are all very close and trying to make the best of the situation - but all I can think about is the other AFS groups already in their host countries, and how we are the only group who hasn’t made it yet. WHY!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? Gosh, really, my love for Turkey is just killing me. Things should have just gone smoothly. Turkey better be as kick-ass as I expect it to be or else I’m going to flip shit..just kidding, I know it will be incredible. I guess all this shitty, stupid miserable stuff happens for a reason. So this post is really long, and during a lot of it I have been venting. But I assure you the next post shall be much more positive (I hope!). Other than that, I’m attempting to listen to Turkish people speak in the airport and figuring out what I’m going to do for the next 9 hours of waiting. Wonderful. At least I’d rather be in Europe than anywhere else…

Stuck in Germany.. :(

Our added detour/adventure