Before leaving for France (the intro post)

So this will be my semester abroad blog. My regular blog is b. mo to go, and I'll probably post these entries over there (or at least I'm thinking about it) so they can sync up with my Facebook Notes. Or I could just copy and paste these entries manually into Facebook Notes.
We'll see.

Anyway, my name is Beth, I'm from Baltimore, Maryland, I'm a rising senior at Gettysburg College (expecting to graduate in the spring of 2010), and I'm studying abroad this semester (Fall 2009) in Aix-en-Provence with the Institute of American Universities program. I will live with a French host family, take courses at the Le Centre d'Aix (The Aix Center), and hopefully have lots of fun, take tons of pictures, and improve my French greatly.

So the first day of classes isn't until September 7, but my parents and I are going on a plane to Paris tomorrow.
I'm excited for Paris but really nervous about the plane (I have a fear of flying on planes). I'm sure we'll be fine, but I can't help it. So my parents are coming along on the beginning leg in the first place because I didn't want to go to France alone while tranquilized (I take tranquilizer pills prescribed legally to me, of course). I don't generally get knocked out on them, but I kind of turn into a zombie. So I didn't want to go through French customs like a zombie by myself, so my parents volunteered to come along and said we could go to France early so we could visit other parts of France, such as Paris, Versailles, the beaches at Normandy, etc.
The flight is an evening flight out of Dulles Airport (outside DC), but we're leaving the house late in the morning because the person taking us there doesn't want to be caught in rush-hour traffic either way since traffic around Baltimore and DC tends to be awful quite often.
The plane is expected to land at the Charles deGaulle airport in Paris around six or seven in the morning (a.k.a. the butt-crack of dawn), so hopefully I can get a little sleep on the plane.
I don't know the next time I'll have the Internet, but I might have it at the hotel in Paris.

Wish me luck on the plane!!