#Entry 2

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.