Staging - Los Angeles

It's been an eventful last couple of days, to say the least. First of all, to everyone that helped say farewell at Ray's last night, it's hard to fully express my thanks. I'll remember that night for a long, long time because of all of you.

Right now I'm in my hotel in Los Angeles after going through a 5 hour staging/orientation. We mostly went over general guidelines of what the Peace Corps expects of us, what we should expect to get out of the Peace Corps, and some common issues we may face overseas. The clear highlight of the day was getting to eat at LA's famous In and Out Burger. The Dude abides...

The flight to Bangkok leaves tomorrow morning. We will be in the air for close to 20 hours total, with an additional hour and a half layover in Tokyo. Once we land in Bangkok and collect our bags, we will hop on a 2 hour bus ride to Amphur Muang, Chainat Province (north of Bangkok). We'll stay in a hotel for the first week, then move in with our host families. We'll stay with our host families for the duration of Pre-Service Training - about 10 weeks - after which we will be assigned to our individual villages to serve the 2 year assignment.

At this point I've gotten to meet my entire class of 63 fellow volunteers. The diversity is amazing. There are recent college grads, married couples, and grandmothers, of all different backgrounds from all across the country. Pretty even mix of guys and girls. All very nice people who I'm really looking forward to spending time with over the coming weeks.

This whole thing is very surreal right now, partly due to lack of sleep I'm sure. Will try to update once I'm in Thailand, but we may not have frequent internet access during the 10 week training. All the best until then...