I will definitely say I am grateful that I did not go out New Year’s Eve; it made the flight New Year’s Day much easier. We left Omaha around 1pm New Year’s Day.  My flight companion was Jais who is also a student at UNO.

It was great to have someone to fly with during the long Journey to Europe, especially since I was quite sad having left my friends and family at home and knowing I wouldn’t see them for 6 months.

So from Omaha to Chicago and Chicago to Sweden we had Exit row seats which included about 3ft of room in front of our chairs.  I brought along a big bag of trail mix for the road that I was snacking on throughout the trip, until we were in the Sweden plane and they announced that someone on the flight was highly allergic to peanuts and that no one should open any peanuts on this flight, so I quietly covered up my huge bag underneath my coat! Such a sneaky American!  The rest of the traveling went pretty smoothly minus a few mis-direction’s in Oslo.

When we made it to Kristiansand we met someone who was traveling to the gym Spicheren, which was where we needed to go to pick up our keys for our housing.  Jais and I were both carrying our 70 liter packs plus two extra bags, all in the rain.  Needless to say it wasn’t an easy task trying to find our housing complex when it was dark, raining, and we were definitely tired.  We walked for 30min then we found a gas station that we thought could give us further directions.  Once we got directions from the gas station we realized how close we were to our housing before we walked to the station, so then we had to back track to our housing but we found it in about 15 min. And we we’re sooo excited once we found our new home!