Welcome to Sweden!

I've made it!

I arrived in Arlanda Airport in Stockholm, Sweden yesterday afternoon. Since then, I've been with my host family in a suburban town outside of Stockholm. It was quite a long travel (20 hours total) with two layovers from LA to the east coast to Swiss to Sweden. Having visited Korea quite often, long travels aren't a foreign concept to me and I really enjoy seeing different airports so I didn't mind it at all.

The strange yet fascinating thing about air travel is that you don't really feel the physical movement of travel. Airports are portals where people enter in one terminal and come out through another whether in a different city, country, or continent. It didn't really hit me that I was travelling to Europe until I landed in the Zurich airport and I didn't recognize the faces and the environment around me. Fortunately, I was so tired from the travelling that I fell asleep early in the night so I should be able to adjust to the time difference pretty easily now.

I did notice a stark difference between European and American airports. European airports simply look more upscale, modern, and recently renovated. Lots of American airports have also started to update their designs but some (e.g. LAX) still have some catching up to do. On the flip side, my host mom told me today that quite a few stores from the US debuted in Europe through stores at the airport (e.g. Victoria's Secret).

I did go through a bit of a mental block on my way over to Europe and started feeling really homesick and questioned my objective for being on that plane; it was so sudden and came out of nowhere. I'm kind of attributing it to the long travel and having to say goodbye to Mother and the SO after only a few weeks at home. It's hard to be excited when you've left your heart on another continent for the next 4-5 months. But hopefully, I can learn to share my heart with Sweden and the other European countries/cities I might be able to visit. (It'd also be pretty ironic for me to regret coming such a far distance because I chose to move to the opposite coast of the US for school, as if 3000 miles wasn't a far distance already.)

For now, I'm just so grateful that my luggage all made it okay, that my host family is incredibly welcoming and kind, and that I made it here safely. Orientation for my study abroad program starts tomorrow bright and early so I'll be getting an introduction to SL, the public transportation here, to get to campus.

#studyabroad #travels #stockholm #sweden #college