it begins

So it's official, i'm going to Germany. to be honest with you i am shitting myself. now i know alot of people are all like, 'it's character building', 'you'll meet heaps of new friends', but until that happens i literally have to check my 'reg grundies' on the hour every hour. last week i went and reapplied for my birth certificate (my old one has worn away with age - something akin to paper mache) and it kind of struck me then that i was doing something massive. today, however, i sent off for my passport, paid for my medical and travel insurance and put a deposit on my ticket - this is where i got scared. or to be more honest terrified. there is no going back now.

i don't know what to do there, except drink beer and not talk about nazis and jews, apparently the former's bad ettiquette. i've checked out a few tours, but i don't think i want to spend 5 hours on a bus travelling past things that look cool, only to stop off at some european devonshire teahouse with the blue rinse set. that however is secondary to my fear of flying and a growing insane paranoia that i will not have any money once i get there. this is what keeps me up at night. 'will i have the cash to see out a year?' 'will i be able to pick up the german language when all i know now are stupid sayings and swear words?' 'will my flight be high-jacked or worse, be sat next to child?' (incidently my travel insurance pays $1000 a day if i am taken hostage, but only for 8 days total. which does nothing for my irrational fear. if it's included in the insurance then it must happen!?!)

over the past week i have been waking up throughout the night with an impending sense of doom. i can trace this sleeplessness back to the 20th of July, which is, you guessed it, the day i got my birth certificate in order to obtain a passport. i can only dread what is going to happen now i've organised everything apart from my visa. which leaves me in another bind. what happens if they don't allow me a young person's working holiday visa? (as long as i'm not 31 i'm counted as a young person which is nice) what happens if i can't scrape together the $4800 i need in order to prove i can survive? i can't reschedule my flight and i can't not go. i've worked myself up into such a frenzied state of excitement and fear and trepidation, not to mention i've told the world what i'm doing. there's no turning back from this. my only sanity lies with a few valiums and a large bottle of scotch. which by the way i'm paranoid about taking on the flight because i'm scared that i'll pass out in hong kong and miss my connecting flight. the only question left to ask is, 'when did my anxiety take over and let me become Woody Allen?'

*i'll get back to you on how the sleeping pattern goes now - my guess is not very well*