prog

i finally bought my ticket to "you're up." drained my summer earnings to do it, but whatevs. it's all one way. i wanted to spend the winter travelling somewhere, but it's pretty up in the air. first it was christmas in bangladesh since that's where my sister was working, but now that's over (she's actually with us in jackson for the rest of summer). she might visit me in prague for a bit in the fall and then be my travel buddy afterwards. turkey, switzerland, who knows. being drained of cash and begging my mom for airfare home seems very likely.

last semester when i got accepted to study abroad, i had little snippets of "the spanish apartment" running through my head, or just visions of myself in an imaginary city which my mind labelled "prague" walking confidently down the cobblestone sidewalk on the way to somewhere fantastic. in my head, prague never rains and i'm always dressed impeccably. head up sort of thing. this was in spite of stacy west trying to hammer into our heads during the oh-so-helpful mandatory meetings telling us not to have expectations of what living abroad was going to be like. before i went to south america, i tried to picture the andes, but everything my mind came up with had a touch of the pacific northwest in it, since that's all i knew about pretty much. does that make sense? since imagining involves the creation of a mental picture, how could i imagine something i had never seen? needless to say, now that i've been to peru i can't picture it any other way, but before my picture of it was just meshes of places i'd already been and movies i'd seen. not much of a comparison in the end. anyway, when i try to picture prague all i get is a lot of cobblestone. it's all a blurry grey.

we've been getting weekly emails from our prague program facilitators, and one included an attachment of all the students studying there in the fall and their email addresses. we were of course encouraged to become acquainted with one another and write emails before we met in september, but i can't bring myself to write one generic mass email, or spend all day writing fifty personalized emails, or (even worse) writing a few personalized emails that i randomly choose to send based on superficial things such as a person's name. that seems pretty shallow, right?