IM BACK!

IM BACK! In Canada that is. And I've been meaning to fill you in on everything for well, almost a month now, because that's how long I've been home.

Coming home was strange, especially in the beginning. My flights went well but were long as you can imagine. That last flight seems to be the one that puts me over the edge. I was utterly exhausted by the time I boarded the plane in Toronto. I remember I was so tired I konked out almost as soon as I sat down and slept so deeply I don't even remember taking off. But that does make for quite a pleasant flight. When I landed in Edmonton I was numb. I don't really know how else to describe it. I was so emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausted and it was surreal to me that in a few moments I would finally be with my family, the people I had longed to touch and talk to face to face for so long. I was taken off guard when I finally did make it through the gates to meet them. I thought I had to collect my luggage on my own first and then go out and greet them but then all of a sudden there they were!
That moment was one of the best moments of my life hands down. To say the least it was one of the most anticipated. Tears come to my eyes just thinking about it. My moms embrace has never felt as good as that first hug I got from her.

So people often ask me how it feels to come home. And I can't really come up with anything other than great. My year in Slovakia was fantastic. I am incredibly happy I had the opportunity to go and do and see all that I did but I am also SO happy to be home. It feels so good to be with my family again, to be where I come from, to be where I know I belong.

I don't mind the questions people ask me. In fact I love it when people are curious about my year abroad. But what drives me crazy is when people ask me 'how was your trip?'. Now don't get me wrong, I totally understand why people ask me this. And I know they don't intend to drive me nuts but REALLY????!!!! HOw on earth am I supposed to sum up ten ridiculously jam packed full months spent in a foreign country in a sentence or two. SO not possible. But I guess if I had to sum it up I'd say it was THE single most challenging thing I have EVER done but definitely, absolutely, %100 worth it.

But much to my surprise all that only lasted a week or so. After that I was amazed at how fast you fall back into routine. Now I feel like I never left. But not like I was never in Slovakia. Because I still have all those wonderful memories and stories in my mind. MOre so it just feels like my time in Slovakia was a dream or something. I know it happened but it's all so far away now.

One thing that is a little weird is Facebook. Whenever I open it I still see all my Slovak and Exchange student friends' statuses and things. So it kind of acts as a reminder that all that still lives on. But its' still weird to think that I'm so far away from all those people because it seems so familiar. And not only that I am so far away from that now but that I won't ever be a part of that the same way I was this past year. Slovakia will never be the same as it was because sure I can return and visit and see all those people again but when I do go I will be a visitor, a foreigner again, not a resident.

It's also been hard because now there are so many people I want to stay in contact with but who are so far away. And yes technology does make that contact a little bit easier but you can only stay in touch with so many people. Between the time changes and everyones busy schedule I haven't been able to talk to nearly as many people as I would like but with time I'm touching base with who I can. But of course I have talked to Mariely already and I'm positive we will be friends for life. I hope to go to Mexico this christmas or Summer (whenever I have the money saved up) to visit her and her family and then in a couple of years I hope she can come to Canada to visit me! I made a number of life long friendships wiht both Slovaks and the other inbounds. And those friendships are what are going to continue to keep my exchange alive.

Now I'm looking forward to finding otherways to be involved with Rotary. I have my presentation to the club on August 18th and I'm sure I'll do some kind of presentation at SAL. And come university (I'm heading to Calgary this fall) I want to join Roteract. And I'm super psyched about meeting the inbound coming to Sherwood Park next year as well as meeting the outbounds at orientation in the spring.

SO that's it! I can't quite believe my year has come to a close but as the ancient proverb says "all good things must come to an end".

ps. I loved blogging so much this year that I want to keep it up. I'm not exactly sure what my next one will be called but I do want to continue blogging through university. When it's created in the next few months I'll post the link so if you so desire you can follow me through university.

four days people. FOUR DAYS!!!!!!!!!!! Can you believe 10 months have passed already!??? It's so crazy to me to think back to when I came. Because it seems like so long ago because I feel and think and am so different than that girl who got off the plane. But even though 'that me' seems so distant now I can still remember all the little steps along the way. All the hardships and triumphs and little day to day things. It's unreal to me that I've actually completed what I started.

I still can't tell you how I feel about coming home. It's such a confusing thing but what I can tell you is that I want this part to be over. I want to be through this good-bye stuff. I either want to go back to my normal slovak lifestyle or get on home already. It is so depressing having everything you do be the last time. So depressing having to say good-bye to every person you see. And the thing is not one of them, NOT ONE person here can I not say goodbye to. I have to leave ALL of them. Imagine that. Everything you structured your life around for ten full months, everything you worked so hard to adjust to, you have to leave. It sucks. But it had happen sometime.

At this point I'm a little good bye partied out. Let me give you a little idea why....
Friday: Said a tearful goodbye to my councilor
Saturday:said goodbye to one of my best exchange friends
Sunday: Goodbye to the outbounds
Monday: Goodbye to the people at the foundation and my first host parents
Tuesday: Final goodbye to exchange student friends and My last host family
Wednesday (today): Goodbye to all my classmates and teachers and my last english lesson
Thursday: Goodbye to my favorite classmates
Friday: Goodbye to Rotary club
Saturday: Goodbye to my best Slovak friend
Sunday: Goodbye to Paul
MOnday: Goodbye to everything but the hardest part; goodbye to Mariely.

So yeah that's what my week looks (ed) like. That is a lot of freakin goodbyes in a very short period of time!!!! No wonder I'm emotional these days. Who wouldn't be? And then as if that isn't enough I have the excitement/nervousness of coming home eating away at me.

But at this point I think I'm doing alright. I have most of the hard stuff over and done with. School, host parents, councilor, and all my activities have been put to rest. As well I have pretty much finished packing as I had to move host homes yesterday. My last host family is going to Croatia for holiday so now I'm living in what was supposed to be my third home (the apartment in the city). So now I'm just finishing up and waiting/dreading the arrival of Monday Morning. I fly out of Zilina 525 in the morning and have one heck of a day travelling. I go Zilina-Prague-Paris-Toronto-Edmonton. I get into to Edmonton at 11pm Monday night. But I'm not too worried about the travelling part. I'm pretty good at that now. :)

So the next time I'll talk to you I'll probably be in canada believe it or not! Or nearly there.

Ceske Budejovice Canoe Trip - Windows Live

Ceske Budejovice Canoe Trip - Windows Live

Here are my pics to go along with the stories!

I think my tear ducts are all dried up. Or if they're not now, then they will be by the time I actually make it onto Canadian soil. Saying good-bye is hard. Way harder than I thought it would be. I wanted to come home for so long so I thought the good-bye part wouldn't be that difficult. I didn't think I was that attached to anything here. But I was wrong. It just takes leaving to figure that out.

I said good-bye to my councilor yesterday. That fantastic woman who got me all the awesome opportunities, yeah her. It was really hard but nice. We met and she took me shopping for a gift for me, which she absolutely insisted on. She bought me this beautiful necklace, actually stunning necklace, made in Slovakia with black stone. And then we went and picked out a few small things for all my little bros and sisters which was fun. Then I gave her my gift. It was a Hudson's Bay scarf, a Canada t-shirt, a Canada waterbottle, a pumpkin pie recipe, a book about Alberta, a post card of edmonton for her wall, and a card with a nice long mushy message in Slovak and English. She liked it alot and that meant so much to me. Her and her husband always say that I'm their daughter because she always wanted a daughter but had two sons so I know that I will always be loved by them no matter how far away I am. They really were two of the kindest people I have ever met and I will miss them. But they told me if ever I'm getting married they just might find themselves in Canada, so perhaps one day you'll get to meet them.

And I still haven't had the chance to talk about last weekend! And it is definitely worthy of space on my blog! What a weekend it was aside from all the emotional stuff of saying good-bye. It was a camping weekend. A camping weekend in Slovakia. So I was a little nervous about the whole thing because I was kind of wondering if rotary wasn't going to just drop us off in a bush somewhere or something and say toodle loo. But they didnt' and as much a disaster as it was it was ridiculously fun. First things first I had to get there. To the Czech Republic that is. And in order to save money i went with Paul and Jenn (from a neighboring city) on the night train which meant getting on at 130 in the am. fun. So it was a bit of a hike, an 8 hour train ride into Prague, then a train-bus-train trip into Ceske Budejovice, but we made it. Exhausted and pre-emptively greasy however. Then we had a couple of hours to hang out in a mall while we waited for everyone to arrive which was fun. 40 plus exchange students loose in a mall, crazy things happen. Soon enough it was time for everyone to pile onto a bus with all our stuff which was supposed to keep us comfortable for the next four days. There weren't enough seats so I ended up standing slash sitting on my friend's lap. And that would have been ok if it had been the ten minute bus ride they told me it would be, but it so was not. It was over an hour. BUT we got there, there being out mini tent city. The camping part was not at all what I expected. We were barely in what I would call wilderness but rather a mini tent city on the edge of the river. But seeing as it was a canoeing trip I guess it made sense.
The first adventure came when we were setting up our tents. I hadn't actually seen the tent my rotarian gave me up. I just trusted him that it was a solid two person tent. And with my experience, a two person tent can usually fit three if not four people if you squish, so that's what we were planning on doing. ooops. bad plan. We set up the tent and found out it was indeed only a two man tent and not particularly sturdy. It more so looked like those tents you would set up for your kids in the basement. But out of need we ended up squishing three people into that little thing, very uncomfortably I might add. But the first full day ended up being quite pleasant. The canoeing was great down the Vltava and the sun was shining. We were having fun.
Day two is when it all started to go downhill. The second night we did some re-arranging so there only ended up being two of us in that pathetic little tent which was much better room wise. But let me tell you, that tent was no match for the rain. I woke up with a lake in my tent, a soaking wet sleeping bag, and freeeeeeezing. It. was. not. pleasant. Especially because the rain didn't let up. It rained and rained and rained for the next two days and that sucked. Not to mention how cold it was. There was a high of 13! and a low of 6! Not what I or anyone else came prepared for. It's hard enough roughing it in the rain let alone when you are on a canoe trip. So in the 13 degree weather we had to put on as little clothes as possible and get into a canoe. AND as it turned out, the first day we were just warming up our canoeing skills. It was just straight forward down the river. But the two days when we were miserable and did not want to get wet we had to go over rapids. RAPIDS! when it was 13 degrees out! The first rapids we hit two thirds of us went over and two thirds of us flipped. And you can't imagine how cold we were. Drenched, shivering, and having ot paddle our little hearts out to get to the end. It was so fricken cold! And things only got worse from there. There were five sets of rapids we had to go over that day and seeing as most of us were not experienced canoers and had flipped the first time the rotarians decided that we wouldn't be going over anymore that day so what did we do? We had pull out our canoes at the bank and walk with them around the rapids. Which was difficult but more than anything the whole thing was dissapointing. Because if the sun had been shining we wouldn't have minded getting wet and it would have been so much more fun. But such is life. It poured rain, so we walked. And even though the rotarians were trying to avoid us getting wet it proved harder than they thought to get back into the water after the rapids because of the currents. And at one point we had two boys go overboard, one hit his head, and the other was trapped with his canoe against a wall, with 3/4 s of his body submerged in the water for more than 20 minutes. So as the icing on the cake we had two ambulance rides. Both of them turned out to be ok, thank goodness, but it was one chaotic weekend. And the funny thing was, when we were at the height of chaos i could only think, wow, this reminds me of home. :D
Despite the misery we did manage to have some fun. There was one evening, we had a campfire, and I brought materials to make smores, so we were really excited! But it was a communal campfire so unfortunately we had to share it with a couple of really drunk czechs (which are not hard to come by when you're camping. I swear to you they all started drinking beer at 7 in the morning. with breakfast!). So anyways, we started roasting our marshmallows when these guys come up and say 'no no no! what are you doing!? we don't roast marshmallows!' and they proceeded to take my marshmallow off the stick and put one of their sausages on it. And then they said 'there, we roast sausages here. you can roast my sausage'. And at first I thought I was just roasting the sausage for them to eat but in the end they were nice enough to give it to me. Haha but it was funny and the joke for the rest of the night.

And that was that. Eventually I ended up back home in my cozy bed. :)

Slovensky Jazyk Slovak Language

Tak že. Ja chcem pisat’ niečo po slovensky tak vidiš viem vel’mi dobre slovenčina teraz. Čo budem pisat’? Ešte neviem…..možno ake bolo môj deň. Ano to je dobre. Dnes bolo dobre ale nie vyborne. Škola bolo vel’mi nuda. Nerobim niĉ lebo to je postlednie tyžden. Hrali sme carty and Mariely a ja pozerali sme Klinkal Grey’s. Po školy prišla som domo. Spala som a potom ja som išla na počitač na facebookou a mail. Nič bolo novy. Potom ja som išla do Helen Doron Anglicky Škola kde učim angličtina. Môj trieda to mala šešt deti a bolo super. Tešim sa zajtra pretože ja nemam škola a môžem spat’! Ja some vel’mi unavena a možno budem spat cely d’en. Tiež (ak nespim cely deň) by som chcela varit’ kanadske palacinky pre môj rodina. Oni kupili kanadske javorovych sirop tak myslim to bude vel’mi chutny.

And now a translation for those of you who don't understand a word I just wrote. I must admit I think I am one of the only North Americans who can speak Slovak. It will certainly look interesting on my resume.

So. I want to write something in Slovak so you can see that I know Slovak well now. What will I write? I’m still not sure....maybe how my day was. Yes it is good. Today was good but not great. School was very boring. I didn’t do anything because it is the last week of school. We played cards and Mariely and I watched Grey’s Anatomy. After school I went home. I slept and then I went on the computer, to check facebook and my email. Nothing was new. Then I went to the Helen Doron English school, where I teach English. My class had six kids today and was really good. I look forward to tomorrow because i don’t have school and I can sleep! I am very tired a maybe I will sleep all day. As well (if I don’t sleep all day) I would like to cook Canadian pancakes for my family. They bought Canadian Maple Syrup so I think it will be very delicious.

So there you go. Some proof that I really do know some slovak!

Good-byes

The inevitable has begun. I've had to start to say good-bye. I'm not going to lie, I do feel like I've finished what I came here to do. I feel ready to come home but that doesn't make leaving any easier.

I only have eleven short days left in this country which has come to be my home. Eleven days! Not that long ago I felt as though I had an eternity to get through and now, somehow, it's all slipped through my fingers. Logic tells me it's been ten months but my brain says something else. When I reflect on my year and look at the thousands of pictures I took, I can remember every event, every detail, every story. It's like a movie in my mind. I guess it must all be so clear because each memory meant so much to me. Everything I did this year was big. Everything took courage and strength. And the end is going to be no exception.

I get what other exchange students mean when they say they don't want to come home. I think more than anything, they are refering to the fact that they don't want to re-enter reality because after being away for so long that's essentially what we're doing. I am so far away from everything my life used to be. Work, school, studying, daily routine and responsibilties, family. And on top of that life back home seems incredibly boring. I mean I just went to the Czech Republic for the weekend. When am I going to get to do that in Canada? So I think a big part of it is that and the other part is, it's down right difficult to leave. I have to say good-bye to everything I worked so hard to earn this year. Everything. Because although I'm sure I'll return to Slovakia, it will never be my home again, I will only ever visit.

Right now I kind of feel like around every corner is another good-bye another ending. It's emotionally draining and overwhelming. But there's also that edge of excitement because I know that with every good-bye I'm one step closer to coming home. So at any given time I can be feeling anywhere from estatic and depressed. I really do feel sorry for those around me.

This past weekend was the big good-bye however. It was the last meeting with all the exchange students and my god was it difficult to leave them all. I miss them so much already. It sounds cheesy but it's the truth when I say they were my family this year. Because when nothing else made sense, when no one else understood what I was going through, they were there going through the same stuff. Despite only seeing eachother once every two months this year we became really close as a group. Inseperable in fact. Whoever said 'you don't know what you have until it's gone' was so right. Because now that they are gone I know there are 42 other young people out there in this world who would have my back, who would welcome me into their home, who would take care of me. The friendships we forged are indescribable and will live on despite the distance without a doubt.

ps. the total count is in. I've gained 19 pounds. I guess it could be worse but I will definitely be hitting the gym when I get home. Funny story to go with this though. I have been having this issue you see. All my pants have been ripping. And not just anywhere but always in the crotch. I've gone through several pairs. It's really quite annoying. And I thought I was alone in this predicament until it came up while camping and as it turns out all the other exchange girls are having the same problem. So either Slovakia has really poor quality pants or we all have thicker thighs than when we came. I'm betting it's the later one but I prefer to tell people it's the first. Either way it's Slovakia's fault.

pps. I just have to share this because I am absolutely horrified. You want to know whats in style here right now????????? MULLETS! but as if that's not bad enough, they have mullets with dreads in them!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! mmmhhhmmm I swear every fourth guy walking down the street has a mullet with at least one dread. It's awful. I CANNOT wait to come home to clean, short haired, sharply dressed canadian boys. oh how I can't wait.

Autisticky Skola

So I had the opportunity, last Thursday to visit the local school for kids with disabilities in zilina. It was so much fun! I'm really glad I had the chance to visit. As it turned out one of the Rotarian's wives is a teacher there and after I did my presentation to my host club and expressed my love of working with kids with special needs they set it up for me. I thought it was a really nice thing for them to do and I really enjoyed myself.

The school is a small private school for kids with all kinds of disabilities and has a really great system I would say. There are eight classes i think with each class having 3-4 kids in it. The kids are grouped into class according to ability not age and there is one aid and a teacher in each room. The classrooms themselves are quite small but well designed. There are work stations seperated out for each child so that they can have a space to do their individual activities as well as a desk in the center for one on one work with the teacher. Each kid has an individualised education plan with unique objectives and outcomes and so each child has a personalized schedule for the day. The have all kinds of learning tools and games and puzzles and crafts and things to aid the children in learning. As well there was a gym with a slide and mats and things where they can work on gross motor skills. So that's the school on the main floor for kids ages 6-18. They also run an adult program and a pre-school upstairs and there is a dentist which comes in to do dental work on the students.

The day I went was a special day. Traffic safety day so a couple of police men came with traffic lights, a motorcycle, and cop car and were showing the kids how to ride their bikes safely and cross the street and things. It was a big hit and each kid got to sit in the driver's seat of the car and turn on the lights and siren which really made some of their days. I had a lot of fun and met alot of raelly neat kids. Roman was one of the coolest kids I've ever met. He had autism and was 15 years old and very smart. If you told him you're birthday (day/month/year) he could tell you what day of the week you were born on. It was crazy! And he also had the ages and names and addresses of all the staff memorized and could list them off on command. He was a really neat guy and I had a lot of fun chatting with him.

So all in all it was great visit.

Now I'm busy packing for my upcoming canoe trip in the Czech Republic. It should be soooooooooooooo much fun! I have a tent and sleeping bag and a backpack to put all my stuff in so i think i should be set but we shall see. I'm taking the night train to prague and then spending the morning there. Then there is another train after lunch to ceske budejovice which is the city where i will be canoeing. the train ride will be a little brutal. I get on at 130 in the morning and then dont' arrive to prague until 9 am but the night train is much cheaper. And by now I would say I'm an a pretty good traveller so it shouldn't be too terribly difficult, but an adventure for sure.