VIII. This is really it

This part was actually written on August 23, but I ran out of time to publish it because we were called to leave. :)
   Right now I am sitting in the lobby of the JFK airport hotel with a whole group of teenagers attired in bright blue AFS shirts. A lot has happened in the past few days, and I still haven't even left the country yet.
   Saturday and Sunday were packing days, and a couple of my friends said goodbye to me then. Monday was pretty crazy; I finally had my braces removed and learned how to use retainers, and I also went to the dentist (I don't know how they both managed to be on the same day, but they did). Suffice it to say that my mouth was very tired.
   On Tuesday morning I said goodbye to half of my family, my cat Kiesha, and my house, and we went to
New York City. The first day there was mostly sight-seeing like the Statue of Liberty, Broadway, and Times Square. We had a hotel right next to Times Square, so that was pretty awesome. The next morning I was almost on TV, but lost the chance to answer a crazy trivia question on the Today Show because they ran out of time. My sister had been watching at home just in case I was on.
   After chilling at Central Park, the rest of my family drove me to the current hotel, and we said the final goodbye (surprisingly I didn't cry).
   The Gateway Orientation, well, is pretty boring. We have a lot of time to just hang around and do nothing, but thankfully there are lots of kids my age. We can all relate because we are all leaving for different countries...today. I just learned however that apparently there are ten people from the US going to Switzerland, and I previously knew of only three, including me.
   Well, I've got to go now. The bus is waiting to take us to the airport.

And now to the present day and time.
   I am in Switzerland! It's so hard to describe all that I have gone through last night and today. As for how I am feeling, I am still really excited. I can't wait to wake up tomorrow morning and learn to understand more of what my new family is actually saying.
   The bus to the airport, from basically JFK to Newark, took two hours because we had to drive through New York City. We checked in our bags, I met some really nice Italian people, and we went through security. The AFS contact person could not come with us, so the ten of us AFS students were pretty much on our own. I didn't get a window seat on the plane, but it was the biggest plane I have ever been on. The flight was at 10:05 American time, and we arrived this morning in Zürich at about 11:00 (It felt like 5:00 in the morning for us). We went through customs, and then we all finally met our host families!
   My family is so nice to me, and surprisingly we can converse pretty well in a mixture of High-German, English, and hand-gesturing. My host father and mother, Martin and Myriam, picked me up at the airport, but my host brother Timon was still in school, so I met him soon after I got "home." The neighborhood I live in is just the cutest thing ever, and already I am trying to adjust to the differences of a Swiss home. Today my host mom helped me get my travel passes provided by AFS and to buy my first cell phone ever for really cheap. It's awesome. My appetite is practically nonexistent. Even though Myriam cooked a wonderful "Nachtessen," I had to force myself to eat; the time we ate dinner was the time I would normally eat lunch, but perhaps the excitement is dulling the nagging sensations of my stomach.
   So, yeah. This was my very first day in Switzerland, the first day of my adventure, but I still feel like it will take a while to really sink in. Oh my goodness, I almost wrote a line in German without even realizing that I was thinking in German. (I was going to write something like, "Hoffentlich ist Morgen eigentlich besser."). My family tells me that my German is actually very good, so now I am definitely thankful for those previous three years of German class knowledge kicking in.
   Guess what guys? This is really it!