Site Visits

We are going to leave for site visits tomorrow. Since I will be in a "rural" location for a week, I may not be doing much communicating. We all have hard sleepers because it takes so long to get there; my train will take about 18 hours to get there (according to my ticket, so maybe longer). This led me to thinking: "What takes 18 hours to complete?" I figured 8 hours of sleeping and 10 hours of preparing for my Language Proficiency Interview (LPI) through rote memorization of dialogues. Yippee.

We were given a packet of information that will keep us very busy over the next week at site. That's because most of the packet is an array of empty fields to be filled in as we learn the information. It is like a great big scavenger hunt to help us better understand the place we will spend the next two years of our lives. Questions such as, "What are two popular local Chinese dishes?" did not escape the person who generated the packet. All of the questions are designed to help us begin thinking about integration, community, responsibilities, relaxation, etc.

Now I will go to bed. Goodnight.