Where
does time fly? 100 days till I leave for my exchange! Leaving still feels very
surreal. It feels like my departure is no way even close to soon and yet at the
same time the more I think about it, the more I realise I am about to leave.
There’s only 15 more days of school left until the last exam week of my first
year of Lukio. My god. Once school’s out I’ll spend June here in Finland for
the first time in very many years and then fly off to Italy for the whole of
July, to get tanned and say goodbye to friends and family on that side of the
world too.
A
couple of weeks ago, I attended the national outbound training in Lahti. It was
great seeing some of the friends I’ve already made through our numerous groups
on facebook and whatsapp. It feels awesome knowing there’s a bunch of people
out there, who will be going through the same exact thing next year, who are
only a skype call away. The huge community rotary builds for its exchange
students worldwide, is one of the things I appreciate most about it. We’re all
one big family.
Last
week, I flew off to Helsinki to attend an art course with some of my closest
friends. We had a ton of fun going to different art museums and monuments
around the city and at the same time exploring a city not so familiar to us. As
always I took a good 500 photos, which you can find on my facebook page. On
Friday, after a very chaotic morning and almost missing my plane back to Oulu,
I was off again. I flew to Tromsø, Norway to go visit my aunt. It was nice to
go back after 10 years and see how things had changed. The city was pretty, but
it’s the scenery that’s breathtaking. I recommend all of you to go visit if you
get a chance. After an action-packed week it feels great to be home!
I recently also found out the city I will be going
to in Oregon. It is called McMinnville, but it is often referred to as
"Mac", which is probably what I'll stick to since the
pronunciation of my future city is causing me more trouble than I'd like to
admit (no, it's not as simple as it looks!). McMinnville is located about
50km southwest from Portland. It's not that far off from the coast either,
about an hour and half's drive, which is really cool. McMinnville is quite a
small city even compared to Oulu, it's population is about 35 000, but I guess
the size of my future high school makes up for it -it has over 1500 students! Most of you know that I've always been in tiny schools, I attended primary and
middle school at the Oulu International school with the shocking amount of 300
students from first through ninth grade and now I'm attending an IB high school
with about 150 students. Next year will be a huge change, both in size of city
and in size of school, but in opposite ways.
