Day two, Philly

Well, I got in to Philly yesterday and planned on dropping everything in my hotel room and getting a quick bite to eat before the staging began. Unfortunately, none of the peace corps rooms were ready. So as soon as I entered the hotel I was caught by the phrase "Peace Corps?" a fellow PC volunteer led me to the Penn room (just a place we dumped all our luggage) and then showed me to the long line of registration and I began my trainee experience.

The rest of the day we worked on getting to know everyone in our group, all 86 of us and talking about the things we were most excited about... and what scared us. 6 1/2 hours later we finished and a group of us were finally able to hit the town and get some dinner, it was 13 hours since my last meal.

Right now we're on a break. I don't know what else we will go over today but at lunch my plan is to head down a few blocks to the house my dad lived in.

We leave for JFK airport by bus tomorrow morning and head out to Ukraine! There are a lot of people here and getting to know everybody before we get in country seems impossible, but the people I have met have been great (no one else from New Hampshire though).

That's it for now, I got to get back to the group, I'll write again soon!

Go time!

Today is the day! It's 7:45 am and in a few moments I will be heading out to the Manchester Airport to begin this little journey. Nervous and excited, thats all I can say.

Dreaming of Ukraine

Two days to go!

It seems like the closer I get to the departure date the more dreams I have of something going wrong. Last night I was in a parade of some kind walking (slowly) towards Ukraine. But in the middle of everything I realized I had forgot something very important. I have know idea what it is now all I know is that I better remember to bring it for the real trip.

The first blog before the trip

Hey, this is my first blog ever! No one knows about it yet, but that will change soon. So here is the scoop for anyone who doesn't know yet. I am going to be living in Ukraine for the next 27 months as a Peace Corps Volunteer.

I've decided to post blogs instead of e-mails mostly because this looks easier than adding literally tens of names to a carbon copy e-mail.

Well, I think that should do it for the 1st blog. Let me know what you think!