You know, in all my excitement for grad school I forgot about the finals part. And, if we're going to be honest, the whole homework part as well. So I'm here in the computer lab trying to pump out an essay, which shouldn't be that hard and in my undergrad years I could easily turn out a twelve page research paper, no problem! But in my grad school mature attitude I'm aiming for quality as well as quantity. Hopefully this will happen for me, but I've never been more stressted over two ten page papers in my life! Jared says I push myself too hard, but I only have a year to do well and it could decide where I go from here, i.e. a PhD program, and if so, how much funding I get. Oh so much to stress about!
On a positive note, we had an amazing time at home for Christmas. The only down side is that it didn't last longer. Everyone kept asking us if we found it strange to be back in the US, but we fell right back into it. We made sure we hit all of our top places to eat that we've missed while here in the UK; LeeAnn Chin's, Chipotle, Big Bowl...yum! I think the only one we missed was Cossetta's. But we'll be back and that'll be the first place we hit up.
But the highlight of being home was seeing family. I didn't realize how much I missed everyone until I saw them. We had a plan with my sisters to surprise my parents by coming home for Christmas. They had no idea! So after a month of planning, Lynae picked us up at the airport in Grand Forks and drove us home where my parents had also just come back from GF. So Lynae went into the garage and met my parents there, said she had a good trip up from the cities and that she had to unload some of her stuff from her car. At that point she opened the garage door and there we were! It was all worth it to hear my mom's scream of surprise! Fun times. After that Lynae, Dana, and I were just glad we didn't need to lie to our parents anymore to prevent them from finding out the surprise!
The trip back to the UK, however, was not so fun. We flew Air France from Minneapolis to Atlanta. The flight was delayed about an hour and so we were sweating to make our connection to our flight to Paris. Turns out when we got there they were boarding the flight but we didn't miss it. However there was a ticketing problem because, even though we had boarding passes that we got when we checked in in Minneapolis, we had to check in again at the desk at the gate in Atlanta and be issued new boarding passes. Why was this, you ask? We have no idea! Anyway, after running through the Atlanta airport and dealing with the ticketing craziness, we were on our way to Paris. When we got to Paris we only had forty-five minutes to catch our fight to Bristol. Which was fine but while we were waiting the screen above the gate kept indicating that the flight was being increasingly delayed. After about three hours of delays it was announced that the flight was canceled due to technical problems. So, we were offered a flight the next morning at the same time and the airline put us up in a hotel. Sad to say, however, the shuttel to said hotel was terrible and we ended up waiting for another three hours for this shuttel that was supposed to come every half hour! Not fun. The next morning we got back to the air port for our 9:45 flight. And it was the exact same thing as the day before. There were increasing delays in our new flight. By this time I thought I would be shocked if I ever boarded a plane in this airport. But we did end up boarding around noon and we were finally on our way. An hour and a half we were in Bristol...unfortunately neither of our checked bags were. So we had to fill out the fun paper work to get our luggage back. When will that be? no idea! Next we caught the bus to the train station. We were lucky that we caught it just in time and were the last ones on before it left. We needed to catch the 1:44 PM train to Exeter because Jared had to work at 4:30. After running through the train station, we got there just in time to see it pull away. Damn! We waited another hour for the next train that would get us to Exeter by 3:44, 45 minutes before Jared had to be at work. When that train finally came, there was trouble on the line and we had to wait 45 minutes before we left the station. So, after exactly 48 hours of travel since leaving Minneapolis, we arrived in Exeter only long enough to get into our apartment, Jared throw his stuff down, and then he was off to work.
Moral of the story, Never fly Air France!!
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