Safe in Halifax

Hey everybody! This officially begins my Semester At Sea experience! This morning Mom and I woke up at 4 and made it to the airport with time to spare :) I had a bagel, of course, and got on the plane. The flights were great - I slept a lot. Continental served cereal on the first leg (austin to newark) and a small turkey sandwich on the second leg (newark to halifax). All was well until (imminent duh duh duh) they lost one of my bags :-/ In fact, they lost about 20 people's bags on my flight from Newark. I'm hoping they find it by the time I sail off tomorrow - otherwise I'm going to be without half my clothes, without all my cliff bars, without all the meds Uncle Ed prescribed me, without ALL of my shoes, and without goodness knows what else mom and I put in there at midnight last night!

Everyone I've met so far is suuuuuuper nice! 5 of us shared a cab from the airport and it ended up only being $15 a person - pretty cheap for a 45 minute cab ride! When we got to the hotel we went to the grocery store across the street to get snacks for the ship, and we just ordered pizza to deliver at the hotel - Papa Marios! At the hotel I actually got a pretty big surprise - a girl from my freshman dorm is on the trip!! Her name is Karyn and she's really nice; I'm excited to have someone I know on the ship.

Canada is pretty cool so far. I'm not going to be here very long, but the architecture seemed cool from the window on our cab ride. A lot of the buildings are very old brick and really antique-y looking. All in all, it's pretty much exactly like the US :) They even take USD everywhere here because of the almost 1:1 exchange rate.

As of right now, Continental really has no idea where my bag is. They think it got lost on the connection in Newark, but they're not certain. They said they don't do scans when transferring bags, so they don't really know where it went wrong. Another plane just got in from Newark around 30 minutes ago, and they said IF the crew put it on that plane, it should be delivered to the hotel by midnight or so. I'm crossing my fingers for that situation! The concierges have been really nice about letting me use their phone to call the airport for status reports.

I'm probably not going to stay up long enough to see my bag come (if it does) - I'm pretty exhausted! And so are my roommates here at the hotel (Elaina and Kim) - we are probably going to turn in pretty early.

I'll check in tomorrow morning before I leave the hotel - I'm soaking up the last little bits of free and unlimited internet!