Quick update!

Hi everyone!  Thanks for all the birthday wishes and safe traveling wishes I received yesterday.  I'm constantly reminded about all of the awesome people I have supporting me.

So, I'm here!  Safe and sound and VERY tired.  Yesterday was a busy day.  I left home around 7 a.m. for a 9:30 flight out of Bradley (which left about 20 minutes late).  At the airport I met Emily, another environmental education volunteer who is from Windsor.  We got to chat before we got on the plane, and then we shared a cab once we got to Washington D.C.  We had a few laughs about the ridiculous amount of luggage we had to carry, and made it to the hotel with enough time to check in, put our stuff in our rooms, run down the street and grab a sandwich, and then get to staging, which started at 12:30. 

Staging, for those not familiar with Peace Corps lingo, is a pre-orientation where volunteers get to know each other and start talking about the mission of the Peace Corps and what the next 2 years will be like.  I should also mention that it is EXACTLY the same, no matter what country you are going to.  That made the hours from 12:30-7 very boring for me, since I had already done the same exact thing last July.  However, I did help my group win the Peace Corps knowledge quiz, so I guess my experience came in handy.

It's been weird being a returning volunteer in a group of new volunteers.  As much as I don't want to keep talking about Honduras, everyone was constantly asking me a million questions.  I made sure to answer questions the best I could, but I also made sure to not answer any questions that I wasn't sure I knew the answers to.  Training varies a lot from country to country, so I couldn't answer anyone's questions about what our training in Nicaragua will be like.  However, people seemed relieved that they could ask me questions, and I was glad I could help alleviate some of their anxiety.  Now that we're in-country, I think the questions will start to let up, as we become more involved with our training here.

After staging ended, we headed out to find food.  I went with 5 other volunteers to a restaurant with outdoor seating where I enjoyed a burger, fries, and a beer...a pretty good last meal in the U.S. if I do say so myself.  Then we headed back to the hotel, and after a little facebooking, I went to sleep. 

At 2 a.m. our wake up call woke my hotel roommate Rachel and I up, and we crawled out of bed and packed everything up again to be in the lobby at 2:30.  At 3, the bus showed up and we headed to the airport.  Peace Corps loves getting people to the airport ridiculously early...our flight wasn't leaving till 7:15.  Both flights went fine (DC to Miami and Miami to Managua), and we were welcomed at the airport in Managua by Peace Corps staff and a few volunteers with signs, cheering, and a cooler filled with bottles of water (hydrate or die! :-) 

Training started after that.  We are now officially in PST (Pre-service training).  We went to a conference center-type place, had lunch, and got started.  I'm posting right now from that very place.  We have about an hour to kill before dinner, and then we will check into the hotel where we will be staying until Sunday for our orientation.  (In case anyone's wondering, we're 2 hours behind Eastern Standard Time)

Tomorrow we will be having our LPIs (Language Proficiency Interviews), and I will see how much worse my Spanish has gotten since I left Honduras in January.  I was at the Advenced-Mid level on my last LPI from Honduras, so we'll see where I am right now.  Hopefully I can pull off a good interview and get placed in an Advanced class.  After these three days of orientation, which include vaccinations, basic training sessions, and other orientation-type stuff, we will be moving out to our PST community based training sites.  The other environmental education volunteers and I will be living in 4 different towns: Masatepe, Naudasmo, Niquinohomo, and San Juan de Oriente.  There will be a few volunteers in each town, and we'll be divided up by language levels and living with host families.


So, there's the update for now!  There's internet here at the training center and also at the hotel, so feel free to skype/facebook chat/email/whatever.  I'll be here!