End of exams, followed by Canadian paperwork

Thursday, June 29th, last day of exams. As always, the empty feeling after the exam atmosphere, the queer situation of being exempt from any mandatory studying and the piles of books and notes, which are lying in my room and clearly lost their goal in life now.
Luckily there's still some arranging for Toronto to be done! On Monday I booked my ticket. And I have to say, it felt strange. Walking home with the documents in one hand and some publicity sun block in the other, I realised that things started to become serious and real. Up until that moment the whole process kept me going, but booking that ticket more or less started the final phase of the application, I am actually going to the other side of the Atlantic, 6.059 km away from everything that's familiar. Just imagine! It makes you stop and think, I can tell you!
On Tuesday, my admission package arrived. A lot of official university forms to go through, among which my schedule. 2 out of 4 subjects overlap, the picking of subjects can start all over again! Hooray...! I am supposed to fax the whole thing out today, so I hope it will be arranged by the end of the day.
On Wednesday, I got a very exciting mail from Neill-Wycik's housing assistant Emma:

Hi Anouk,
You have a room! The letters will hopefully go out by the end of this week, but YOU DO have a room :)
Emma :)Housing Assistant

It made my day! The sky looked a bit bluer, History of the British Isles all of a sudden didn't seem impossible anymore, and there was an indefinable smile on my face! Now it's even more official!

The adventure can start! I am ready, as far as one can be ready for this sort of thing. The maps of Toronto still look a bit frightening and so does the size of the campus, but I am confident that things will fall into place once I am there on September 6th, 2006.

The end of year 2 has arrived, Summer holidays are just 1 day away. Next time I'll be in a lecture hall will be in Canada. I will tell you all about it!

Preparing to leave

Who would ever have guessed that I would keep an online blog one day? No one, I know. And yet, here we are, the very first post, I am sure many more will follow. As final exams are headed towards their last week and I feel the end of a chapter in my life drawing near, I thought it best to start writing this blog now, and not to wait until my Canadian Adventure comes near. For those of you who are not informed yet, I am about to leave for Canada, September till January, the first time I will be away from home for longer than a couple of weeks. Exciting and thrilled, but also apprehensive and a bit anxious about what this plan will bring.

There's a mix of feelings I can hardly define, let alone describe. Of course I will miss my family and dear friends and of course there will be tough moments, but 6 months (what am I saying, 5 months!!) will be over before you realise it and in no time I will find myself back in Belgium writing my Bachelor paper, at a deadly pace without a doubt.

Preparations are coming to an end, my room application is sent, my ticket will be booked in a couple of hours and my University application was approved. Leaving my room in Leuven and going home for the summer will be the transitory period between year 2 and 3, between ordinary student life and Erasmus adventures.
I hope this website will at least give you an impression of what these months will mean to me.

To finish this first post, I would like to thank a few people who have been a great support these last months of anxious waiting and preparing Toronto: my parents of course, I couldn't even start thinking about leaving the country, let alone about leaving Europe, without their help, my grandparents (train trips, driving lessons and of course good-old Grandma-meals! What would I do without them?! All 4 of them together: 295 years of knowledge and experience, no one can beat that!), my 2 sisters, Fré and Julie, sometimes a pain in the neck but in general two great girls ;), all my friends, in Leuven and Sint-Truiden, especially Nathalie, who had to hear all the complaining and endless paperwork stories. Thank you all, you were great!