First, I would like to say that there are only 17 more days until my 16th birthday. Yayyy. Anywho, today I went luggage shopping. Originally, my dad and I had picked out a bunch of rolling duffel bags online and we were going to choose one of them, but we found out today that the maximum dimensions (every dimension added together) has to be less than or equal to 62 inches for checked baggage. So, that eliminated a bunch of choices (I guess that's why they were on sale... no one could use them!) We then looked at regular suitcases online, but I really couldn't imagine what it would be like to roll one of these behemoth suitcases around, so my mom and I decided to go to Kohls and look at their luggage. We weren't expecting to buy anything, but ended up falling in love with a giant orange rolling duffel. It's exactly 62 inches, and has a capacity of 4.8 cubic feet. And it only weights 11 pounds! By far the best of all the ones we looked at. Plus, it was on sale for only $120. All in all it was an extremely successful shopping trip.
On another note, I got my visa information Friday night. I looked through all the instructions from AFS (the document is like 25 pages!) and we're going to contact the consulate in Philidelphia this week to get my paperwork started. Sadly, I have to wait to get placed before AFS Italy can even send me the documents I need to actually get the Visa, and that's supposed to take ages. I just hope I can get mine before I'm supposed to leave :/
Finally, I went to my PDO last Saturday. Even though I already knew pretty much everything we talked about (I'm constantly on cultures-shocked and have basically memorized the AFS website) it was still fun to meet the other outbounds. No one else is going to Italy, but there are two boys going to Indonesia with YES abroad, and one of them goes to my school! It's nice to have someone to conspire with. Plus, I got to meet up with all the kids I had met at their mid-stay orientation in January.
So that's pretty much it. I'll be sure to update as soon as I get my host family placement. It's only been like... four months :p
Ciao a tutti!
