After I passed the passport control, I started to realize that yes, this is all for real. And I am actually flying to America all by myself—if you don't count the other passengers.

Unfortunately, the flight wasn't as joyful as I expected, despite the delicious lunch (let's not even try to compare it to Aeroflot) and Baskin-Robbins ice cream for dessert. I started to panic. How could I go to the middle of nowhere for the whole summer, away from everything I love and know?! I suppressed the horror by getting to know my neighbor. It turned out the girl's name is Marina, she is from Yessentuki (where, by the way, there are many Greeks—our interest in this nationality coincided) and she is going to Louisiana to her brother, planning to stay there forever, just like he did a few years earlier. We had a great chat and simultaneously noticed a cutie flight attendant named Jeffrey, at whom we were trying to make eyes at the same time. In short, the 10 hours flew by quite quickly. A little later, in the queue for passport control, where they took fingerprints and photos (deciding it was an eye scanner, I stared as hard as I could. The poor American actually flinched when he saw the result on the computer). So, in that queue, I partially met and partially spotted about 10 other Work and Travel participants who had also arrived for the summer. Then there was a man with his school-age sons (it turned out the guys were my age—also in their fourth year), who told me about coastal sharks and advised me to definitely see Manhattan; a yellow taxi; a hotel room with a giant bed so big it evoked far from chaste visions, a shower, Skype (including a call to clarify tickets for tomorrow—the flight was moved 2 hours earlier), gloomy reflections on how I can't understand anything, and finally, sleep.