10 days until exchange

My name is Baehlee, and I am from Minnesota. In exactly 10 days I will be starting my year as a Rotary exchange student in Denmark. This blog will be all about my year there.
To start off with, I’ll tell the story of my life leading up to my exchange.
It all starts way back to my first trip without either of my parents. It was seventh grade, and I went on a mission trip to Denver Colorado with a local church. After that week without any sort of family member with me, I figured the whole traveling thing was pretty neat. I had seen parts of the country people in my family hadn’t seen before.
Fast forward a couple years later, it was eighth grade and I had just joined the swim team. There was a girl on my team who seemed a little different from everybody else, after awhile I found out it was because she was a foreign exchange student from Denmark. Immediately I  envied the way she was so excited about all the things that seemed so normal to me, I wanted to see the world in the same way she did.
That next year, I started high school. One of the first things I did was get information on how I could become an exchange student. The results were not too great. I had to be sixteen by the time I left for my exchange, which meant I had to wait a year longer than I had anticipated. The year after that, I was finally ready to apply. Tons of paperwork had to be filled out, and I had to do two extremely nerve-racking interviews. Shadows of doubt filled my mind as I waited to get my acceptance letter, I was afraid I wasn’t good enough. The day the email finally came, it was clear that all the stress and fear was well worth it. When I read the email, I cried from total happiness. I was finally able to do what I had spent the last two years dreaming about.
 A few months later, we all found out our country assignment. One of my top choices had been Croatia, a Rotarian from my club told me the probability of me going to Croatia was very high. So when I was told I was going to Denmark, I was incredibly disappointed. But after learning more about the country, I can honestly say that I am beyond happy with my country assignment. In ten days I will start the greatest journey of my life so far, in a country I’ve already begun to fall in love with.