The Long Awaited Blog

Hello! Well, friends and family, here is the blog I've been talking about for months now. And just in time. I'm leaving June 3 to go to San Francisco for Peace Corps 101 and then fly off with the rest of the M21's (the 21st class of Mongolia volunteers) on June 4. We fly to Seoul, Korea (a 12-hour flight--UGH!), have a 3-hour layover in Seoul, and then fly to Ulaanbaatar (the capital of Mongolia--only a 3 1/2 hour flight). We'll arrive at about 9 PM on June 5. PC staff and other PCV's (Peace Corps Volunteers) will meet us at the airport. We board a bus to go to Zuunmod where we'll stay in a dorm for about a week before we're farmed out to our Mongolian host families. Each PCV lives with a Mongolian family by themselves, but we all have training together for the first 3 months. At the end of training, we're given our site assignments where we'll be for 2 years. My work assignment is university English teaching. I won't know exactly what that entails until I get there. You'll notice that the Peace Corps has its own language made up of acronyms. I am sure I will become fluent in PC-speak in no time. Becoming fluent in Mongolian, however, is a whole 'nother story. I've done some studying already and feel pretty comfortable with the alphabet (modified Cyrilic--thank you, Russia :/ ). It's just the putting the letters together into words and the words into sentences that I have yet to learn. No problem, I'm sure. Ha! Ha! The pictures I've posted are from my Farewell Tour (as my boss, Steve, dubbed it). I went to Williamsburg, VA for a family vacation, to Maine to visit friends, to Merlefest (a fabulous Americana music festival in Wilkesboro, NC), to Myrtle Beach to visit my college roommates, and ended the Tour with a blowout going-away party at my sister's house in Salem, VA. WOO HOO!! Now, it's all over but the packin'. All my stuff is laying in the floor, waiting for me to pack it into 2 bags (not to exceed 100 lbs. together) and a carry-on bag. If only I had Hermione's magic expanding purse. I'm going to have to make some tough decisions over the next few days, cuz I don't think it's all going to fit. I want to thank you all for the well-wishes, good-lucks, and gifts I've received. I couldn't do this without support from my friends and family. Check back in on me from time to time.