Flights, Arriving in Conakry, and Langauge Interview

So I write this from the PC house in Guinea. On Wednesday morning the volunteers took a bus over to JFK from Philadelphia where we waited 5 hours for our flight. We all thought we were going to be bored out of our minds getting to the airport so early, but between checking in, making calls home, getting lunch and buying our last American things (I got two baseball caps to give my to my host family who I will live with for 3 months), and playing Apples to Apples at the gate, the time flew by.

The flight from New York to Senegal was only about 7 hours, and the meal we got was the best airplane food I've ever had. I also got 2 Heinekens as part of the beverage service free of charge. I didn't sleep at all on the plane, partly because I never do, and partly because I was really excited. Luckily the plane had the idividual movie screens so I watched a couple of movies along the way "I am Legend" and "Juno".

After we landed in Senegal, we had to go through immigration to get to the part of the airport where we checked in to our connecting flight, then we had to go through immigration to get to our gate. This was a bit time consuming and frustrating because most of us were tired (this was at 4am east coast time, 8 am local time), and we were dealing with African French for the first time (different accent and pronounciation) not that regular French would have been much better.

We made it to our connecting filght which was only about an hour and then the Peace Corps staff from Country Director down to Janitors were there to meet us, help us with our bags, and welcome us. They took care of customs and immigration for us before we even got there so we were out of the airport as soon as we had all our bags. A short van trip later and we were in the Peace Corps compound which contains the transit house - a place for trainees and volunteers to sleep, shower, watch movies, etc while traveling through the capital, the Country Director's house, and the office building which has all the support staff offices (medical, program directors, housing people, etc).

We were all sleep deprived to some degree or another, but we arrived around 10am, and after lunch at noon, we had two orientation meetings to introduce us to the staff, and get general PC Guinea facts and figures told to us. We also filled out some administrative stuff to get our bank accounts, etc. After this we had dinner, and some of the volutneers went to a bar and tried Guinean beer, it was called Guiluxe. It is a pale beer sort of like PBR, other volunteers said it was "skunky" but I thought it tasted as good as Pabst (interpret that however you want). The other type of local beer is called Skol. The bar also sold Heineken, but it was almost twice as expensive (though even Heineken is only $2). I went to bed almost immediately after going to the bar.

Today we had a medical orientation, got our medical kits (containing tons of stuff including vitamins, gauze, scissors, various medications, stool sample collecting kits, malaria blood slide preping kits, insect repellant, etc) and typhoid fever vaccination. I also had a brief medical interview where we talked about snakes for like 5 minutes. Apparently I don't need to worry about anything other than a black mamba, nothing else should be able to kill me. :-)

At my language interview, my interviewer and I chatted for 15 minutes where I did most of the talking. I talked about where I'm from, what I will be doing here, my family, my pets, my hobbies (wow, trying to explain horn playing in French was sort of a challenge), and did a scenario where I was trying to buy an apartment. Here we ran into confusion when I asked how much the apartment cost and he said 1,000,000 GNF. When I was like "whoa that's too much" he was confused, and then I realized that's like $300. Anyway, I think I did ok in my interview, I'll find out later where I placed for language training. I'm hoping to have done well enough in French to being working on Soussou or Pular right away.

Oh yeah, and I will definitely be a chemistry teacher, apparently to younger kids, like the 8th grade equivalent. I still don't know where though, I will find that out in 3 weeks.