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. :)