Hi; I'm Alexis, but most people (friends at least) call me Lex. My family calls me Lexi, and my dad sometimes calls me Moron, but usually only when I deserve it. He probably would have called me a moron when I took the picture to the right, if we're being honest.
I am far too naïve for my years and simultaneously too aware to stay stagnant much longer. I am a senior at a high school with a graduating class of forty-five, and I like Jude Law, potatoes, and watching soccer and football more than any girl probably has a right to. I love reading romances and having dinner parties with my best friends, and my parents are beautiful people who I don't deserve.
I am a Rotary Youth Exchange Outbound for the 2012/2013 school year to what is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Denmark is no stranger to me; I was blessed with the chance to visit for my birthday in July/August of 2011. When I return, however, things will be different. Going to Denmark, this time, will not be a vacation. I will leave my home, my country, my family, my friends, and my cats and dog in the summer of 2012 to start a whole new life in a whole new world. I'll probably have to learn how to ride a bike, for that matter.
My wanderlust has always been brimming just below the surface of my consciousness, and, after four or five years of waiting, it had truly become unbearable. I had become infatuated with different parts of the globe at different points in time - my first fascination was the Far East, and I've progressed into quite the Europhile since - but there were words that my mother said to me that make me blame her for my condition.
"There's a whole world out there. You've just got to go and see it."
My mother had started saying that when I was in elementary school, and it was something to dream towards. It isn't a want to travel, although seeing the world is a wonderful thing altogether. It isn't even the idea of getting away from home, which I have to admit is appealing as well. The rub in my hometown is this - nearly everyone is near the same. In sociopolitical, financial, ethnic, and religious terms, the place that I have grown up is a one-note area. I have never known anything but that, save the frequent trips to Chicago that I love to make with my mother, and that is what I believe my exchange is about.
Going to Denmark will be about language, about culture, about people. It will be taking myself and transposing my life into an entirely new environment, with no rock to hold me up in a land entirely unfamiliar, with people who have grown up under completely different circumstances.
It will be terrifying, and it will be entirely worth it.
I can't wait.
