I haven't written anything in my blog,

I know... My apologies. You will now receive a (hopefully) brief synopsis of my week.

We arrived safe in sound after a long 20 hour flight, rest, flight last weekend into the hands of Peace Corp Staff at a nice resort about 45 minutes from Manila. It’s a lovely place with a water park (aka 2 pools and 4 slides), Animal Island (aka the place where you can get dangerously close to ostriches and feed dead chicken to crocodiles) and a fishing place (aka the spot with murky fish water). This would all be awesome if we weren’t dying to start learning the language and finding out approximately where we will be for the next 2 years. Most of us are thinking aren’t we out here to teach? Why the resort? Well my thoughts are there are a limited number of places that have the equipment to host 140+ of us, so basically cruel joke. This is exactly what we won’t have in the duration of our stay in the Philippines.

Good times.

The fun part is I have never been more ready to leave the lap of (somewhat) luxury in my life. Sitting in a ballroom from 8:30 am to 5pm is not fun, especially when your bum hurts so much from the previous day its hard to sit still. We've been given exciting info on how to send the medical officers stool samples if we ever get sick and heard from the embassy all the extreme case scenario ways we could die, as well as the different creatures of the seas and how touching one can kill you. All of it very helpful but I still plan on swimming with Whale Sharks and going island hopping. The possibility of having to send a stool sample is definitely the scariest part of it all as crazy as that may sound.

Thursday we shall finally find out where our training sites will be. This means we'll know which of the four languages we're learning, what regions we could possibly be placed in and we'll get to meet the first host family. All very exciting and definitely better then what we’ve been doing.

The few things ill miss... Seeing all the lovely people I've gotten to know this week since we're getting split up into 4 groups and of course getting fed 3 times a day plus mid morning and mid afternoon snack, although I think that’s a common practice outside these walls too... Something I could for sure get used to.

As far as what the future holds who knows, the Peace Corps now controls my life (but only a lil bit). I’m just happy I got here in one piece.

_Jessica_

P.S. I have already been asked twice if I am Filipina and once I tell them I am Mexican they understand. I am sure and have received confirmation that more of this is to come, bring it on, I love talking about my culture.