Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Leaving on a Jet Plane

Chinese word of the day: qu 去. Qu means "go."

We fly out at 6:13 a.m. tomorrow, which means we're loading the bus at 1 a.m. tonight. We will fly Denver to San Francisco to Beijing, and arrive in Beijing on the 29th. Time difference is 13 hours ahead of Central Daylight Time.

Enough of the boring details. Here are some last thoughts about my time in the States:

Goodbyes: Good! It was great to see so many people before I left home.

Orientation: Mostly helpful. My favorite part was meeting the other new teachers and hearing their stories. (There are folks fresh out of college, a Vietnam vet returning to Vietnam for a different kind of service, a lawyer, a customer service rep, you name it! And we will all be either teaching English or starting full-time language study.)

Travel: Always exhausting. Please be thinking of us as we start our long journey to the Far East.

I'm excited to begin our teacher training in Beijing and start experiencing the sights, sounds, and smells of China. See below for a few photos of us working hard during Colorado orientation - really!


My orientation roommates after a rousing round of hallway golf. Ah, dorm life.


Outside ELIC's headquarters in Fort Collins


Hiking at Horsetooth Reservoir on our Sabbath


Beautiful day!



4 comments:

  1. oooh! we can be blogger buddies!! mine is lmshunk.blogspot.com

    keep me up to date! :-)

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  2. Pretty pictures, Alison! I'm glad you had a good training experience. I hope the trip is going well. :)

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  3. Horsetooth! I've been there! Did you climb the "mountain" or just take a couple trails at the park. It's so beautiful there! Your kind of day

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  4. We didn't actually have a trail at all! We were on the wrong side of the reservoir to really do any hiking, so we just wandered around for awhile. It was gorgeous.

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