Six more days!

While I still have a lot to do before I go, including a fat research paper (I'm 3-4 pages in so I'm taking a well-deserved break right now), it's so surreal that I'll be leaving at the end of the week. As I've told a lot of people; I haven't really done much packing so far; I've only made a few unofficial piles of stuff throughout the house a pepto-bismal here, a photocopy of my passport there, and the like. I usually pack for trips by making extensive lists, sub-lists and drafts of said lists, so last minute packing actually isn't that bad when you make lists obsessively. Once I get my final exams out of the way, that's when I'll really start packing everything up. I also need to do a few things here and there around the house, such as typing up instructions for mummy dearest as to how to use the DVD player and putting little sticky dots on the appropriate buttons to help her out, or finding a good knitting project to take with me on the trip.

Even though everything hasn't sunken in yet, my parents have been treating me as if I'll be gone forever or as if I don't have much time left in this life, which for the most part is kind of nice and the rest is strange: my mom is making my favorite things for dinner every day this week, I'm not allowed to drive in case an accident happens which will hamper my health or my plans (the strange part), and last Saturday my parents finally took me for a drive down Lombard Street (when I ask if we can go my dad usually tells me there's no time) and later we had dinner at Ikea (I do like their meatball plates).

My trip sunk in a little when we made a trek through Chinatown to buy copious amounts of candy for my host families as it sort of hit me that there would actually be real, living, breathing people on the receiving end of these gifts and these gifts were meager offerings to thank them for letting an American college student live in their home for 2/8 weeks. I've spent months trying to imagine the curious, exciting feeling of waking up in the mornings in another house and realizing I was in another country so after all that time, it's just strange that it's actually going to happen now.

Swathi and I will be leaving for Whangarei, New Zealand this Saturday with a stopover in Hong Kong first. I just checked the weather for Whangarei and tomorrow's forecast is in the lower 60's and raining. Temperature-wise, it's been similar to the weather in SF lately minus the recent heat wave. New Zealand is known for a lot of outdoorsy stuff, but I don't know the the weather will permit us to do any of that. Most of things I want to do involve shopping though, so I think I'll be okay with that. We'll be tormenting the unsuspecting Kiwis for about two weeks and then it's onto a stopover in Hong Kong before we go to Bangalore for 2 months...