17 May 2012

First Impressions

It took awhile, but I've finally made it to a mental state to start telling travel tales.

First of all, remember when I went to Las Vegas? Yeah, well, what I didn't tell anyone was that after sitting on the plane for an hour or so, my flight was delayed to the point of me missing any and all connections that I needed in Chicago, so I had to go home and wake up extremely early the next morning to catch another flight. It was miserable. So of course I'm worried about not being able to fly out of Pounds Field in time to catch my flight from Dallas to Frankfurt. Lucky me, that 25 minute flight went without a hitch! Then I just sat in the airport for three hours or and waited to board the flight to Frankfurt. In the process, I met other GTL kiddos on the same flight and formed a coalition. We joked that if the plane were delayed and we missed the bus to Metz, at least we wouldn't be alone! Then the plane was delayed. We didn't joke anymore.

Apparently some fellow got on board, felt sick, and decided that he didn't really want to fly to Germany anyway. So he got off the plane. But one cannot simply walk off of a plane. The airline has to go into the bottom where all of the checked luggage is kept and fish out his bag. This takes awhile. While they were fishing, it came to the airline's attention that there were some metal shavings in the ball bearing of something pertaining to the lavatory. So that had to be fixed, too. Two and a half hours of sitting on the tarmac after our scheduled take-off time, we finally got into the air. The good news: I had an aisle seat. The bad news: the fellow beside me had extremely broad shoulders that spilled over into my zone. Oddly, he had really short legs. So when I told my parents I was hoping to sit by someone "normal-sized", I guess this guy averaged to normal. He was uncomfortable to sit next to, though.

We did miss our shuttle, but lucky for us there was a later one scheduled. We just had to sit and wait some more. And, voila!, I'm in France. The first night was a welcome dinner, the second day an orientation, and classes started on the third day. For the orientation, we got to bus into downtown Metz and walk around for a bit before eating dinner (at an Asian place?), hopping aboard the tourist train for a guided tour, and then attending a reception with the mayor.

My first impressions of Metz:

-cora is amazing
-where is the peanut butter
-how can one consume this much bread without becoming bread themselves
-it's colder than I thought
-I wish it would stop raining
-the mayor is extremely punctual
-these French people are so trendy
-soccer all the time
-these crows have got to be Crebain

My first impressions of GTL:

-class? what?
-so. much. lunch.
-so. many. vectors.
-homework assigned the first day, due the second, quiz on the third. lawdy.

1 comment:

  1. Just so you know, it'll never stop raining, or get warmer. :/

    ReplyDelete