As senior Ulrika Blom walked sleepily out of her plane into the Kansas City International airport, there was only one thing on her mind: to freshen up. The Wessling’s wouldn’t allow that, though. Sophomore John Wessling and his family stood outside her gate, waiting for Blom with a big sign and balloons as soon as she walked out.

“I was sleeping on the plane,” Blom said. “I maybe had mascara or something so I was like, ‘Okay good, I can go to the bathroom, get my luggage, and I can land first.’ But then when I came out of the airplane, they were there. I wasn’t ready for them because I was just walking, kind of half-asleep, and then it was like, ‘Boom! Woah! Hey!’”

Senior Petter Bakken and Blom are both exchange students from Europe. Bakken came to the U.S. from Norway, while Blom came from Sweden. “Everything was new and exciting,” Bakken said. “Scary and exciting at the same time. I’ve actually never been outside of Europe before I came here.”

Bakken wasn’t the only one who found coming to the U.S exciting. Wessling said he was very anxious to meet Blom.

“We all sat down as a family at dinner and decided that we should get a foreign exchange student,” Wessling said. “I was just excited to have another person in the house other than the people who live there.”

Bakken mentioned that the strangest thing that’s happened to him since he arrived was his first meal.

“The first thing I ate was a fried egg hotdog,” Bakken said. “That was weird. It’s at the hotdog place at Shawnee Mission Parkway. I didn’t like it very much. It was a little too much.”

Blom also found the food in the U.S. different.

“You have a different culture when it comes to food,” Blom said. “It’s a lot of fast food and instead of making homemade food, Americans go out and eat a lot. I mean, it’s cheap so I get why Americans go out and eat instead of making food.”

Bakken and Blom met in seminar and are now good friends. They said their similarity of their countries helped bring them together.

“I just came in and she was talking Swedish to her mother on the phone,” Bakken said. “It was really awkward because I was listening to her. She thought no one could hear what she was saying, but I understood her because I’m Norwegian.”

Adjusting to the new environment wasn’t difficult for Bakken because he started learning English in the first grade. For Blom, it wasn’t the language that was difficult.

“First, [school] was pretty hard and all because it’s a whole other system that you have,” Blom said. “We don’t have the six-minute breaks. We have maybe 20 minutes between every class and everyone doesn’t get out of class at the same time. Trying to find Times Square was hard.”

Bakken also mentioned how welcome he felt when the school year began.

“That’s one thing that’s very different,” Bakken said. “Everybody’s really nice here. Everybody’s really including. North is very much like a family, you know. Everybody is friends here.”