I'll be home for Christmas...

For most of last week, I spent my time hunched over books and notes and reviewing exams from past years from my Pulp and Paper Technology class. I spent countless hours formulating and memorizing answers to these questions, only hoping the same questions would be on my upcoming exam. As I'm sure you could imagine, it gets rather boring rather quickly learning about fibre morphology, chemical recovery, and recycling. So to cheer myself up I listened to Christmas music. Even though it wasn't even Halloween yet.

What can I say? It just puts a smile on my face thinking about the holidays.There really is nothing better than listening to Bing Crosby singing "I'll Be Home For Christmas"... especially while counting down the days until we really DO come home for Christmas. Yes, you heard me correctly folks! For those of you who didn't already know... Ryan and I will be back in Minnesota for Christmas!

Not only will we be coming home in December to celebrate Christmas with our families, but we will be home for good as of 5:32 pm December 21st. Assuming there are no flight delays, of course. No, it wasn't always the plan. We didn't try to deceive you into thinking we'd be here until June while secretly plotting to come back half way through the year... but some things have come up that made us change our plans.

You see... the whole reason we chose to study here in Lulea, Sweden is because UMD had a program set up that allowed Industrial Engineering students to spend their last year here taking all the classes they need in English and then graduate after they get back. Plus, they also had some really interesting Chemical Engineering electives that I was excited to take. Sounds like a pretty safe, well established plan, right? We thought so too. Boy were we wrong!

It turns out that Lulea is currently in the process of changing that "well established program" over here... So not only are a lot of classes that Ryan thought he'd be taking over here not even being offered this year, but the classes he has taken so far have been taught in Swedish. Also, half of the classes I thought I could take over here are not being offered this year either. Shocked yet? So were we.

There was some sort of grave miscommunication somewhere along the way. Either Lulea failed to notify UMD of these changes or UMD just decided not to notify us. After all, why should they care if we waste a year studying abroad in Sweden? We're still paying tuition fees to UMD despite the fact that universities in Europe don't charge their students tuition. You can see now why we'd be angry... we're paying all this money only to be misled. Awesome, right?

After evaluating the situation from our first quarter here, we discovered that there would be no useful classes that we could take spring semester to transfer back and help us graduate. So it was either go home a semester early or stay the whole year like we had planned but have to put back graduation. Definitely not an easy decision. At first, we were dead set that we would just stay and enjoy ourselves, travel Europe and worry about the consequences when we got home in June... but then reality set in. It just wasn't realistic to essentially waste a semester's worth of tuition for both of us just because it was our original plan and just because I desperately wanted to travel Europe. We had to be flexible.

So... we booked plane tickets home. And I found us an awesome apartment via Craigslist. We move in January 1st and we're going to be subleasing from a girl who is studying abroad next semester. So it worked out perfectly for everyone. And our new apartment even has a dishwasher! And a washer/dryer in our apartment that's not coin operated! I haven't had those kinds of luxuries since I left my parent's house four years ago. I'm SO excited.

In the end, after we made the tough decision to come home, it was like everything fell into place. We both know now that it was how it was supposed to be the whole time. The big guy upstairs was just telling us that ten months away from our friends and family would just be too much. And I agree with Him. We're both so excited that we'll be able to celebrate our first Christmas as a married couple with our families and to be closer to home for the remainder of the year.

For all of you who were excited no to see us until June, I apologize. I guess you can just pretend we aren't back in Minnesota until then... But we'll be home in 7 weeks whether you're ready or not!  You better enjoy what you have left of that unseasonably warm weather. Because I'm sure I'll be bringing back one heck of a snowstorm just in time to have a white Christmas! Who's excited?! Because I sure am!

Can't wait to see you all in 7 weeks and 1 day!!!

Until next time...
-The Bogarts