Let’s just say that I went somewhere that I desperately wanted to talk about but didn’t want to call by name. Let’s just say that I did not feel like discussing the reasons for this publicly. Let’s just say that I chose to call that place Elsewhere and asked you to call it that, too. Let’s just say, OK? Okay. Adelante!
Monthly Archives: December 2015
all shot up and ready to go
It’s looking increasingly definite that my contract, and thus my health insurance, will end on December 31. So before going on vacation I made about eight doctor’s appointments, all for the last three weeks of the year, to get my medical ducks in a row before losing my benefits / leaving for Senegal.
February 15, 2016 is just shy of two years from the day I promised myself to do a French language sabbatical in Senegal within two years, so I’ve set that as my target departure date. But there’s nothing forcing me to go then – I don’t have my plane ticket yet, I still haven’t signed up for the immersion program, there’s no job waiting for me there afterwards. At times, I harbor doubts about my ability to step out into a much more nebulous unknown than ever before. I wonder if I’ll actually go through the motions of booking the ticket, scheduling the classes, pitching myself to the people who could give me work in West Africa.
But I realized this afternoon as my needle-phobic self walked back to work from the latest doctor: there’s nothing like paying $340 and rolling five band-aids deep after three travel-related vaccinations and two blood draws in 24 hours, to redouble your commitment to the thing that necessitated all that anxiety and expense.
As I rubbed my sore arms and staunched the irrational fear that my throat would close up from an allergic reaction to the typhoid, meningitis or polio inoculations, I also smiled gleefully with the knowledge that I’d be damned if I let the never-ending-needles ordeal go to waste. Today was one more baby push out the door to go abroad.
And on that happy note, have a lovely weekend!
[Photo: Chhor Sokunthea / World Bank]
(get over the) hump day inspiration: Terry Pratchett edition
I don’t actually need any hump day inspiration considering that I got back from vacation last night and did literally nothing at work today but hang out and hyperventilate/chatter about said vacation while extremely high on espresso and life.
I’ll share photos once I sift through all 1,500+ of them and find the gemmiest of the many, many gems… Because where I went, it was eye orgasms every which way you looked.
Hasta pronto, mis amigos! No puedo esperar para mostrar mis fotos del más magnífico vacaciones en la historia de vacaciones! (I’m still high on that coffee, fourteen hours later.)
adios, amigos!
It’s 1:57 a.m. and I have to leave for the airport at 5:05. Part of the reason I’m still awake is that tomorrow today is the last day of my Spanish class, during which there will be a final exam. Because I won’t be there, my teacher provided me with instructions for taking the exam online on some special site. So in addition to my usual last-minute million things to do, tonight before packing I took a 1 1/2 hour Spanish test.
Which I failed miserably. Not because I did badly per se, but because something went horribly wrong when the timer ran out on Part One while I was still typing, which somehow triggered the entire exam to submit itself without giving me a chance to move on to the more heavily weighted second essay. And apparently once the exam is submitted, there’s no way to reverse course and continue working on it.
The submission confirmation page showed me what the second essay question was, so I typed something up in Word and emailed it to my teacher, along with a little note beseeching her to show me mercy.* Since I’ll barely have Internet access during my trip, I won’t actually know whether she did or not til I return from what will be the true test of my Spanish skills.
…In approximately twelve hours I’ll be in Mexico City, trying desperately to be understood. And wishing desperately for a nap.
Back in a couple of weeks. Hasta luego!
*I care about my grade not because of pride or perfectionism but because if I don’t pass the test, I don’t pass Level 3 Spanish, and I can’t move on to Level 4 if I ever come back to work here after my current contract ends.
what not to do when planning an international trip
1. Buy your airline ticket.
2. Vaguely look into visas and decide you don’t need any for the countries you’re visiting.
3. Wait a month.
4. Two days before your trip, think to yourself, did I adequately check whether I need a visa for that one country?
5. Do a quick Google search.
6. Convince yourself a visa may be necessary even though the vast majority of the information online claims that you can get it in the airport… But there are those one or two sites that differ.
7. Panic.
8. Call the airline and attempt to ask in Spanish (yes, it had to be in Spanish) whether it is in fact possible to get the visa in the airport.
9. Further panic when the customer service guy wants to look up your ticket first, but can’t find it. (Yes, panic, even though when you click on a link in your ticket confirmation email, it takes you to a second confirmation page directly on the airline’s site. And even though the reasonable explanation for the confusion is that you can neither correctly spell your name in Spanish letters nor intelligibly articulate dates or times in Spanish numbers.)
10. Miraculously understand when the guy tells you he’s going to attempt to find someone who speaks English because the conversation will be too complicated otherwise.
11. Wait on hold for fifteen minutes, worried.
12. Call back when phone gets disconnected. Wait on hold another twenty five minutes.
13. Finally get on the line with someone who speaks English, and within the space of two minutes, confirm that your ticket is just fine and that you can get the visa in the airport before your flight, no problem.
14. Hang up the phone, and close ten Chrome tabs on which the same information was written, but which you chose to ignore because you court anxiety like it’s Vitamin C and you’ve got scurvy.
talk foreign to me 