Holy crap, I'm finally home! It's so weird to be back! Even though I was only gone for 1 week, coming home to PA feels like a completely other time and place.... so I can only imagine how bad I'll be once I come home from 10 months in Trecase :P
Anyways, I've severely underestimated the power of the internet, because you would've thought my dog was just resurrected after being hit by a truck with the way I wept tears of joy once I was reconnected to wifi! #21stcenturyprobz
As far as AFS goes, not a lot happened while I was on vacation other than me having to push my visa appointment back 1 week due to lack of paperwork from the Interculturra (AFS Italy). I plan on giving a full visa synopsis once I have had my appointment, because I can't even make up how ridiculous that process is (think water boarding but with paperwork) and in the meantime here's just a tiny fraction of what I've been working on since getting home an hour ago...
Nothing says vacay is over like 20lbs of paperwork ;)
But I digress, this past week was so much fun! Naturally, whenever I went to the boardwalk or a shopping center, I looked for as much hokey Italian junk as possible (and got all the weird stares as I stopped traffic to snap a pic of it). For anyone who isn't a native of the mid-Atlantic region, let me just give you a mini lesson on the beaches. So as far as the mid-Atlantic goes, there are 4 main states that I would consider to be the tourist attractions.
You have Maryland (where I go) which includes Ocean City, Maryland - a huge beach town that is basically the mellow version of Jersey
Delaware - Mostly smaller, quainter beaches - for the rich or elderly (but they have tax-free shopping so don't count it out)
New Jersey - The pinnacle of East Coast beach towns are all in Jersey, most famously Ocean City, New Jersey (home to Jersey Shore and most of the Italian beach goers)
And Virginia - They have some huge resort towns too, but personally I've never gone to a VA beach
Call me biased because I've been going to the same beach my whole life, but OCMD is, in my humble opinion, the crown jewel of all of said beaches above. It's got just the right blend of everything mentioned previously to make it a fabulous place to go, and here's a taste of how my week in a little slice of paradise went :)
The view from my condo's balcony <3
Our condo we stayed at was a lovely beachfront 2 bedroom on 137th street called the Summersea! :)
It's certainly not the aquamarine of the Caribbean, but for murky Atlantic seawater, the ocean was surprisingly beautiful the entire week :D
My inner white girl Instagram junkie just couldn't resist doing this, sorry guys ;P
Pardon the awful tan lines I'm sporting, but I just so happened to run into one of my best guy friends Ian in OC, so we seized the moment and went mini golfing :D Notice that sick brontosaurus in the background? It was dinosaur themed ;)
Personally I'm not that religious, but it seems that every year some sort of artistic church group comes down to the boardwalk and makes insanely impressive and huge biblical sand sculptures, and it's hard not to want to drop and do 10 hail maries at the sight of these things! This one was about 15ft high I'd say!!
Of course, the boardwalk wouldn't be complete without some sort of street artist or performer trying to make money off of you every 3 blocks, but this man was by far the best! He was an artist who would make incredible fantasy landscape paintings of the planets and nature in about 5 minutes using only spray paint!! And he synced the whole thing to freaking dub step!! #newhero
Observe the Italian flag waving high and proud over the boardwalk <3
Some pretty sweet graffiti I think, and apparently the boardwalk management does too, because this was the only graffiti I actually saw!
Finally a decent group picture! Obviously I'm not that photogenic, but from right to left: me, my sister Alison, and our friend Sophie who came down with us
Ever since I found out about my host family, I've had this overwhelming urge to document literally every detail of my life, and I realized this when I was scrolling through my phone photos and half of them were of either a field out of my car window, a random building, or whatever I was eating for breakfast :P In this case it turned out to be okay, because I ended up with some pretty great pictures that I'm happy to share with all of you :) But my memory card is telling me to tone it down, so I guess I'll spend the rest of the night clearing out my photo album, yayyyyyyyy.
Only 5 and 1/2 weeks to go until my life as I know it will inadvertently change forever, I dive head first into a completely foreign culture and language, and meet the people who will become my new family for 10 months.... strangely I have yet to have a single second thought or regret.... should I be happy about that or concerned?
Anyhow, one big ramble of a blog post later and I am almost at 700 views! You don't have any idea how glad I am that I actually have people out there who enjoy reading what I wrote :) Unless you're a parent and you force your child to read my blog as a form of punishment, in which case it's not that enjoyable....
The Speedwell picnic is this Sunday and my visa appointment is on the 7th, so I have lots of fun shin digs to write about in the future, Ciao for now :)
No comments:
Post a Comment