January 1st- Departure Day

I just wanted to start out by wishing everyone that may be following along with us on our trip a very Happy New Year! For the majority of us, today was departure day. Most of the group flew out of Minneapolis on the same flight as Professor Ripley, with that flight departing at 7:40 p.m. with a connecting flight the next morning in Amsterdam, to finally reach our first destination for the class: Athens, Greece! For myself, I departed Chicago at 5:30 p.m. and will meet up with the group out of Minneapolis in Amsterdam for the same connecting flight to Athens. We had others in the class on different flights from numerous different states as well. These states included California, Colorado, North Dakota, Iowa, and Massachusetts. We even had a couple people flying out of Spain that will meet up with the rest of us in Athens later in the evening. Thankfully, the first leg of my journey has so far been quite uneventful, and I will be landing in Amsterdam around 8:00 a.m. local time. Unfortunately, however, this is seven hours ahead of where my flight originated from and Athens is still yet another hour ahead of Amsterdam, so it will more than likely take a few days to settle in and get used to the time change. Before departing, we were assigned a reading by Pico Iyer entitled, “Why We Travel” and asked to reflect on the reading with the goal of getting us to think about our own reasons and hopes of what we will get out of our class and trip. I really enjoyed a few quotes from this article that I feel like capture a few of the many reasons (aside from the class content, of course) as to why I am very excited for my first experience studying abroad as well as traveling internationally outside of North America: “We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate… The first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, and from a crooked angle.” I am very much so looking forward to landing in Athens tomorrow and I hope you will all continue to follow along with our class throughout the month.