Staging: from Philadelphia Arrival to Last Supper

So I got to Philadelphia for staging late Sunday night. I met my hotel roommate, L. who is from the Pac. NW area as well, and is pretty awesome. The following morning, after uneventfully exploring Philly a bit, I started Staging, and met the rest of my 25 member Peace Corps Guinea G16 group. We are all going to be teachers, roughly 7 English teachers, 9 math, 5 physics and 4 chemistry (or so). I still do not know if I will teach physics or chemistry because both of these are lumped under "science" and almost all the science teachers have a stronger chemistry background than they do physics, especially the three or four bio or pre-med/Islamic studies majors. Given the spread, I think my chances of teaching physics is up there, but I might try to weasel my way into chemistry as I'm one of 3 actual chemistry majors (one of which is strongly physics inclined).

So my training group has had several chances to hang out after our training sessions, we all got dinner together last night, and then wandered Chinatown in search of a good bar (which we never really found). Then tonight, after our staging ended about an hour early, we all went out for dinner, splitting between Chili's (a desire for one last American Chain Restaurant meal) and a family style Italian restaurant which was very very good, if a bit expensive. Our waitress was going to be going to Indonesia soon, and when she found out we were heading out for Africa tomorrow, she set us up with a special dessert tray to end our 5-course hearty Italian meal.

After our "last supper", we met up again at an Irish pub, and played trivia games. Our training group split into three teams: Guinea or Bust, Peace Out, and The Guinée Pigs, of which I was a member of the latter. Of the three PC teams, ours got the highest score, but we still didn't make it above 4th place overall.

This staging has been an amazing way for all 25 of us to not only learn each other's names, colleges, majors and PC assignment, but also to get to know each other in a deeply friendly way that only 25 people bound to train and work together for 3 months, then be among the only Americans in a third world country can.

I'm anxious about the fact that in 11 hours I will be on the road, where my final destination about 18 hours later will be Guinea, my home for the next 2 years. I'm anxious about every challenge and adaptation struggle that awaits me, but I am also very excited to meet my host family, train in French, Soussou, Malinke and/or Pular, eat the local foods, and begin to expand my understanding of the local culture. I'm excited to being teacher training, and soon be in front of my own class of élèves who will (with any luck and some skill) learn a bit of science from me. Yeah, mostly I'm excited.

Alright, soon to bed to see if I will have the infamous mefloquine induced crazy dreams.