June 12th - Message from Siri (Denmark)

    As I woke up this morning at 3 o’clock I knew it was the beginning of a big adventure. It was the 12th of July 2012 and the big exchange student trip to the East Coast was about to start. The excitement of getting the adventure started and to meet a ton of new people made the awfully early morning a tad easier. For me the trip started in Fargo where I flew in with a couple of other exchange students to Chicago where our next flight to Philadelphia would be. As we sat in Chicago and waited to board more young people came and sat around me and my friend. We were curiously watching them wondering whether they could be exchange students heading the same direction as us. Finally a girl took courage to go and ask us if we were heading towards the east coast and with friendly greets our adventure of meeting new people could begin. Soon we were about 10 exchange students gathered on the uncomfortable seats in the gate – about one third of the whole group. We were already talking with each other, each one of us with a smile on our face and excitement in our eyes. Part of the excitement disappeared as we heard our plane was delayed due to a combination of bad weather in Philadelphia and the President Barack Obama’s arrival. Well, the second reason most of us found kinda cool, I mean, how often do you get to say that your flight was delayed because of the President of the United States?!

    A couple of hours later than planned we got to board and head towards Philadelphia. As we finally arrived to gloomy weather, we went to get out luggage and soon one of our guides, Elle, met us and led us to the bus that should bring us to the hotel was another group of exchange students were anxiously waiting. Names and greets were exchanged and although there are 35 names to remember (!!!) we’ve all been practicing and we are already doing pretty well. After our luggage had been placed in our assigned rooms we went to go to Danny’s – a good old American fast food chain. After eating way too much food we had a short orientation meeting where Kiersten told us about the different rules that we would need to follow unless we wanted to get send home early. One of the rules was for example that we have to speak English to each other – a rule that seems fairly simple but since there are a bunch of people from the same country it can be hard to avoid not to speak our native language. I’m sure that we will all give it our best as we all are very excited for the next two weeks to get started. It’s about time to go to bed because we have a busy day waiting ahead of us tomorrow with different museum trips and so on. This is the first night of our journey and it already started off great. I’m sure that this trip will fly by but that’s mostly because we will be having so much fun. I’m sure this will be a trip to remember forever! Thank you so much for reading this post, we will keep you updated every day.

From SIRI (Denmark).