The trips are finally here!

The trips are finally here! They felt so far away at the start of the year but the time went by fast. Time truly flies when you’re having fun 🙃. This is the first trip of my gap year at Ålesund Folkehøgskole (there are 3 in total) and I chose to go to Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia). It’s about a month in length (the longest one). I’m excited! I mean at what other point in my life could I do something as cool as this??

But if we fast forward a bit, I just traveled back from home (Florida) yesterday to Oslo. So saying I’m tired is an understatement 😆. But luckily I got to have a fun (and frosty) day before getting to the airport (again 😟).

My friend took me on a tour of Oslo since I had never seen it before. I got to see the city center, the modern Deichman library, the opera house, the royal palace, and Frogner sculpture park. The weather couldn’t have been better, just pure sun. I thought the city was very nice, I can see why she loves living there. It’s like a way calmer and cleaner version of New York City 😂.

But after that, I had 14hrs of flight time ahead of me… The Oslo airport was very nice, I guess it helped that our class of 25 people was pretty much the whole line 😜. The flight to Istanbul wasn’t bad, I got some sleep and watched some of a movie. The flight to Kuala Lumpur actually wasn’t bad either. I got lucky with the amount that I slept on the plane, others… not so much.

As we were getting close to landing, I kept waiting for a break in the clouds so I could see the city. But as we got closer, I realized that the city was the cloud. It was covered in smog.

The train system was a little hectic to get out of the airport, there were SO many people that we had to squeeze in like sardines. And our backpacks were huge so we may as well have been two people 😂. The streets were bustling, full of cars dodging people and people dodging cars. Crosswalks aren’t really a thing here I can tell…

After we got settled into the hostel, a group of us went out to get some cash from an ATM and then food (what we’d been waiting for). I got chicken skewers and fresh mango.