Friday, July 30, 2010

Visa app and the such

Hey Everybody!

So far my blog has been fairly boring so in an attempt to make it more interesting, I'm going to talk about the visa process.

A week or two ago I got my visa info from AFS and I started the crazy process of collecting different kinds of documents and waiting for AFS to send me the rest of the documents i needed. After calling the consulate in New York numerous times and going to the bank and the doctors office, I went to Fedex and got my application shipped off to the New York office of AFS. Because of the time constraints, AFS is going to personally walk the application over to the consulate in hopes that it will get thru the scrutiny faster.

So essentially now im just waiting for my visa to be processed and sent back to me.

Also I've been painstakingly trying to prepare for my departure in 19 days. I have so much to do in so little time. I'm working on going through my closet and trying to create a packing list. Unfortunatley I think of new things to add to the list all the time so its kind of like a never ending process. I will say packing for an entire year and multiple seasons is a lot of work and stress. But soon I'll be in Belgium and it'll all be worth it :P

On the plus side though, I have all my paperwork in for AFS and I have my flight to New York booked. So just one step closer...

jusqu'a la prochaine fois

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Departure info and such

Okay so I've finally gotten around to updating this thing. Since my last post I have gotten my flight info and departure info! wooooooo
I will fly from stl to jfk on August 18th and arrive there in the early afternoon. After that i'll spend that night and the rest of the next day hanging with other outbound exchanges students and doing AFS orientation stuff.
On the 19th i board a 6pm flight out of jfk and will land in Brussels at 7:40am the next day (which is complete craziness). Finally, i'll spend a couple of days there with AFS before meeting up with my host family.

I'm pretty excited and also slightly stressed and nervous. Mostly excited and ready to be in Belgium. And the stress basically comes from trying to figure out my visa application, and trying to imagine what i'm supposed to pack. I just got my visa info this week so all i got to do is get a million documents filled out and sent in to the consulate. No big deal of course.....yea right....

okay a plus tot!