Moving Right Along...

Shengri Kuai Le USA (Happy Birthday USA)! I hope all the folks back home are having a festive holiday. For us, the most exciting thing about today was finally getting our training site and host family assignments! Richy and I found out that will be completing our training at Sichuan Normal University (Main Campus) and living with a host family about 15 minutes walk from campus. Our whole group of about 90 people have been split up among 4 universities in Chengdu to live with host families and complete our language, culture, and teacher training before being placed at our more permanent sites in the fall. What we know about our host family so far is that they are a married couple with a 6 year old daughter and that their hobbies include reading, calligraphy, and table tennis. I am interested to see if they will be willing to help us learn some Chinese writing (assuming we'll have any spare time). We will be meeting them and moving in tomorrow afternoon!

The last few days have been a whirlwind, especially with the jet-lag. We've attended many sessions on language, safety and security, health, Chinese history, TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), and on Peace Corps administrative details. We've eaten out with our language teacher, been vaccinated against hep A&B, rabies, and Japanese encephalitis (which stung) and passed out in our hotel room in-between. Our daily language classes are starting back at the basics, but it seems to be good review and I think it's really helping improve our tones and pronunciation. The language groups will be re-organized in a few weeks. We have also found out that in the next few months we will be spending a week with another host family at the site which we will be placed at after training (kind of a trial to help us get to know where we will be for the next two years, and what skills we will need there). In a lot of ways it's nice to have so much support and training, but it's also exhausting! I can't wait to get placed in our host families so we can develop daily routines and stop living out of our suitcases.