Progress...

So I got my Staging Kit from the Peace Corps! The Staging Kit has some final forms for me to fill out, a booklet to give to my family about how to deal with me being over there, a booklet about cultural adjustment for me, and all of my flight and pre-departure information.

They actually moved my departure date back by a week, so I will be leaving at the end of July instead of mid-July. I guess that's cool...more time to spend with my friends and family. And I found out that my pre-departure location is Washington, D.C., which is also exciting because I've never been to D.C. before! I know it's a long shot, but maybe I can sightsee around a bit at night after all the orientation stuff...maybe not.

The booklet that I have to read for cultural assimilation is kind of scary! It talks about adjusting to the training and the culture and the work, etc., but it gives so many examples of what might happen and what I might feel like at such and such time, and most of the examples are things that I have never even thought of. I mean I've thought about adjusting to the culture some, but I've mostly thought about missing my family and friends, since homesickness was something that I had a little bit of when I studied abroad in Oxford....for only four months! But since I've already been through that, then I'll know what to expect and how to deal with it, and I guess I'm just happy that I'm informed about all the other situations through this booklet. I'd rather have information than be taken by surprise.

I'm spending more time with the language and now know the alphabet and some basic phrases. The alphabet was quite confusing at first because they have many of the same letters as the English language, and some are even pronounced the same, but then there are English letters that have different English sounds. For example: H is pronounced like N, X is pronounced like H, P is R, and C is S! And then there are the craziest symbols that usually sound like more than one letter such as ch, ts, sh, sht...crazy. But I definitely have it down!