Flower for Eva

With just a few paragraphs I want to pay tribute to Eva, a Finnish girl I met, who was spending her exchange semester here in the US.

How we met...

We first met in the library where we were coincidentally using the same table to study for exams. Somehow we got into a conversation during which she told me why she had decided to study at the US. She had always wanted to study abroad and she when she heard that there was the possibility for doing an exchange semester she didn’t want to stay in Europe, because she had already seen most countries there, but decided for the US instead.

I always envy the Europeans as they are usually travelling around their continent already at a very early age and can speak several languages. This is why we kept on talking and later decided to meet the next day too. This continued and we really became good friends so that by the end of the semester I was really sad when she had to leave. However, before she left we did two more weeks of travelling through the US seeing so many places that even I hadn’t seen before. I guess I will always remember those two weeks.

A sad farewell

After this semester she returned home and we stayed in contact via skype and email. Nowadays you would think that keeping in contact is easy, but actually it can be hard too, as there is often nothing really interesting to talk about.

At first we were writing almost every week, but then there were month were we didn’t hear from each other at all. I must admit that this was largely my fault. I had lots of stuff for university – at times CSUN is really busy – and simply wasn’t in the mood for writing emails about my uninteresting life. Eva was really upset about that, writing me a long email about that she felt we were losing the connection and that she was really sad about that.

Flowers to appologize

After reading that, I was really angry with myself for not having stayed in touch with her and replied her with a long and detailed email. However, I felt I needed to do something more to apologize. Just two weeks after it was her birthday and as I knew that she loved flowers I decided to send her a beautiful flower arrangement over to Europe.

At first I thought that would be pretty expensive but after doing some internet research on flower delivery companies I found out that sending flowers va the internet was not only convenient but also quite affordable. I knew that she loved sunflowers so I had her delivered a beautiful bouquet of sunflowers together with a nice card.

I was really excited about what she would think. One day in the middle of the night my phone rang and it was Eva. She had gotten the bouquet and had decided that she had to call me straight away, no matter what the time in America was at this hour. Eva really loved the flowers and hadn’t suspected anything like that before. She even sent me some pictures of the bouquet which looked really fantastic. So I guess when I have another friend in a foreign country to surprise I guess I will send flowers again.

Anyway, since this flower surprise Eva and I have managed to stay in touch and next summer the plan is that I will visit her in Finland and probably travel to other European countries. I really hope that this plan will work out.

Love you Eva! This one is for you!