I'm back!

Okay, so after much harassment from people I've decided to resurrect the blog. I'm not going to do daily updates or anything like I've done in the past. I mean, who has time for that kind of thing? My goal is to write something once a week or if something big comes up. I'll be back dating a few of these first entries from my journal but I should be caught up soon.

I've made it back to LJ and there were several things that I've forgotten since the last time that I was out here. The first one is that it isn't a twelve hour flight from L.A. to Hong Kong, it is fifteen. I'm pretty sure that I have airplane a.d.d. because I'm always dying by the end of that flight. I did end up next to a nice Australian guy who was about my age. He had a really thick accent and was hard to understand but we got along well. He invited me to go grab lunch with him in Hong Kong but I figured since I only had a four hour layover I'd better just hang out in the airport. After Hong Kong I have two more stops and with each one it becomes more and more like a different place. Hong Kong's airport is different but it is different in the fact that there are Prada and Gucci stores. With each stop afterwards you become more and more rural and things get increasingly less western. At my second stop I remembered a few more things. One is that there is no such thing as a line here. People just crowd around and push their way towards the front of whatever line they are supposed to be in. I remembered this pretty quickly so I did the same and it saved me a lot of time. I also forgot how big I am compared to everyone else here. The people over here are generally small but most of the people I would see were minority people and they are even smaller. I'm basically a giant wherever I go. The third thing I remembered in the airport is that every price is negotiable here, including how much you pay in the airport for overweight baggage (which I'm pretty proud that I got a third of the price knocked off).

After getting to town it has been a busy couple of days. Friday I got moved in and ran some errands and then yesterday we had a big Easter egg hunt with a ton of kids from our apartment complex. I've also started language already (I think it is a record to start that on your first full day here). I basically work with a tutor for a couple hours a day and we have a book full of pictures. We work in groups of six pictures and he says points and says the word and I write down how I think it sounds. Then we go back over the words again and he just points. Then he mixes up the order and says the words and I have to point or do the command that he is giving. Then we record an audio file for me to study later. Then we add six more. By the end of each session we go over between forty and fifty words. It isn't that hard until you start having thirty plus words you're supposed to remember and your brain is tired. But I don't think it will be too bad. I'm looking forward to getting the language down.

My game plan for the next couple of weeks is to spend them out in some villages. I'm not exactly sure what to expect. The villages that I've been in before have been pretty rough places to live. No running water, not good food, and only an outhouse with a hole in the ground. I'm going to spend my first week at my tutor's house, then come home for the weekend, then go back out again to another village the next week. I'll be leaving tonight and will be back on Saturday. Six days is a long time to spend out in a village. The longest that I've stayed out before has been four days and by the end of it I was dying to get back to civilization. I'll update things once I get back.