I Have Arrived!

Well it has been several months since I updated this thing. I was waiting for everything to fall into place before I started writing about my internship, and that seemed to take a while. Then when it all the ducks started to get blown out of the sky, well they all came down at once. So here I am, in Brussels at 3:40 am wishing I had gone back to sleep when I woke up- the time change can be a difficult thing. But I have heard that it is more difficult to come this way than to come back. For those of you who don’t know, I am currently in Brussels, Belgium doing an internship for the US Mission to NATO in the office of Civilian Emergency Planning, which is under FEMA (I have learned too many acronyms in the past 2 days I think my head might explode). As of two weeks ago I still didn’t have my interim security clearance because my fingerprints had not yet arrived at NATO (they took 4 weeks to get there). Once my security clearance went through I immediately contacted the housing coordinator and requested a place ASAP. They had a house set up for me pretty quick, and within a week of getting my security clearance I had bought a plane ticket and was packing for Brussels. So here I am now in my room in Kraainem, which is just outside Brussels, wishing I had fallen back asleep sooner. Well I wanted to let everyone know that I had arrived safely. I also wanted to get the ball rolling with this blog. So I will post more about my trip and my first few days at work later. But for now it’s off to get a few more hours of sleep before my first full day of work, the past 2 have been full of traveling around and signing documents and getting security badges and the what not.