Conquering the World: oh hai San Francisco

03 June 2011

oh hai San Francisco

So I finally made it to Staging and am completely exhausted. Jet lag and I are not friends at all. My clock claims that it's only 9:30pm right now, but my body is begging me for sleep. I know it's only going to get worse, so I'm going to try to keep this brief but (hopefully) entertaining.

In the time since my last post I successfully graduated from college. Win. I then had three days to spend at home before coming out here to begin my Peace Corps journey. There's not a whole lot written about Staging in the journals, so here's an attempt at explaining what goes down. We started the day off with breakfast with all of us who arrived in SF early. Rocked a delicious omelette and got to know about 10 people beforehand. Then after checking us in with our paperwork during which they scolded me for having the wrong form (not my fault they sent me the wrong one), we moved on to ice breakers to get to know the half in our room. Since there are 66 of us in our group, they split us into two rooms alphabetically. They reviewed the 3 goals and the 10 core expectations with us, we did some skits, drew some posters (I was chosen to do the drawings - be concerned), and got to know each other. I of course indulged in some judging of my fellow trainees, but much of my opinion will probably change after knowing them for more than a few hours. Unfortunately I don't really know the other half of the group because they were in a different room, but with a 12 hour plane ride tomorrow, I think we have time to do some bonding :) So yeah, it was interesting. Some was hilarious, some was insanely boring, but I think we have a pretty solid group. Unfortunately due to being so tired and the times of staging, I didn't have any opportunity to explore SF at all. I saw the Bay Bridge from the taxi window, but no Golden Gate bridge and no Alcatraz. Guess I'll just have to come back another time.

Tomorrow we have to check out of the airport at 530am, board the bus at 6, and be ready for an 11am flight. So early. Awesome. But luckily(?) they changed one of our flights so we are no longer arriving in Mongolia on Saturday. Instead we're spending the night in South Korea! This means I totally get to count South Korea as a country I've been to. I'm not entirely sure how that's going to go, but I'm hoping for the best.

I'm so tired I can barely think straight and the internet in this hotel disconnects every 10 minutes or so, but I remember I wanted to show a couple pictures from my last days stateside. So I'll finish off with those and a couple quick notes about general things. First, I think i figured out how to update facebook with my new blog posts. we'll see how that goes. Second, this will be my last post in the applicants section of PCJ which makes me kind of sad. Lastly, this is my last post stateside! I'll catch you all again when I'm in Asia!