Thursday, November 11, 2010

Plane Tickets Ordered!


This is our acceptance letters.

It's been a while since we have made a post on here, but South Africa is rapidly approaching. We officially booked our airline tickets for Tuesday February 1st. Alyssa found an awesome deal online and we got our tickets for around $600 dollars less than they normally are. We leave out of Chicago at 6:40 p.m. We then fly to JFk in New York where we will have a 12 hour layover. It's long layover but we decided we would rather have that long of a layover in the U.S. verses an international airport where they maybe speak a different language. Then we take off from JFK at 10:40 a.m for a 15 hour flight with a 7 hour time change for Johannesburg. We arrive there at 8:40 a.m. Thursday morning. Finally, we will arrive in Port Elizabeth at 11:55 a.m. There will be someone at the airport from NMMU to pick us up and take us to our apartments.

Now after that long paragraph about our flight I can talk about everything else we have been doing. We have to get student visa's since we will be there longer than 90 days. It's a rather long process but it's coming along well. Along with the visa's was a slue of shots and other paper work. We got our acceptance letters in the mail and we are now working on completing our housing papers as well as the rest of the insurance letters and things of that nature. We hope to be able to send out our visa stuff to the consulate in Chicago by Friday. South Africa has a pretty fast process so we should be able to get them back in 14 days or so.

This is just some of the paperwork we have been doing.

Along with all the other paperwork we have been looking up classes to take while there. We won't officially be able to sign up for classes til the first week we are there during orientation. However, UNI likes us to plan ahead so that they can approve the classes we want to take ahead of time. I'm sure many of you know but Alyssa changed her major a couple of weeks ago. She will now be a Family Services Major with a emphasis on non-profit service management. She pretty excited about it and I think it was a good change. She will be able to take classes pertaining to that major in South Africa and should still be on track to graduate in four years. We are now approaching the two month mark. On Wednesday we will be officially two months from leaving. We will try and start posting more often, but classes are getting crazy with finals approaching. We are already starting to make a packing list so if anyone has any ideas or suggestions for international travel feel free to let us know. Thanks and we will talk to you soon.