Entering the Blogosphere!

Perhaps it's because today is day 2 of my endeavor to get up at 4:30am and everything feels a bit surreal this early in the morning, but here I am with a blog. It only took appr. 3 minutes to sign up and get posting, and I don't have to know a lick of html. One could probably be web illiterate and still have a decent weblog; it's amazingly easy.

So here I am, adding to god knows how much drivel is already out there cluttering up cyberspace, but my Yahoo mail account is slow and mass emails will be exponentially more chic viewed as blog entries, nhee?

I actually woke up before 4:30 this morning; Jason and I are spending our second night in the Peace Corps office and the floor is pret-tie hard, not to mention the loud, buzzing mosquitoes that always manage to find my face. So it was pretty easy to find the strenth to go ahead and get up. A lot of volunteers go to bed early/ get up early, not having electricity; my motivation stems from the fact that our schoolday begins at 6:30am sharp, so if I want to practice yoga, shower, and eat breakfast, I've gotta rise and shine at 4:30. This also means I should try to go to bed before 10, which is not always the cool thing to do, especially at a Peace Corps slumber party, but . . .

There are quite a few of us here this weekend. Everyone came in to use the internet, see other Americans, grab some last-minute resources. I, for example, am speeding through "Teaching English as a Second Language to Large, Multi-level Classes" with hopes of having some sort of plan for next week's classes. It would probably help if I knew which subjects and grades I will be teaching this year, but our school likes to make that information a special surprise for the first day of school. At least I can count on teaching somebody English this next year, so I'm attempting to come up with some loose ideas for a game plan.

Needless to say, no one else is awake right now. I spent the morning browsing through the blogs of other volunteers in our Peace Corps Namibia group, mainly to check out the pictures you all at home have been telling me about. I ended up skipping most of the picture links, drawn into everyone's personal perspectives of Peace Corps, training, and Namibian culture as well as feeling a rather voyeuristic interest in how they all spent their holidays, what they're doing in their communities, . . . Perhaps a strong reason for why blogs are so ubiquitous now--plenty of us willing to publish our otherwise silent thoughts, and plenty ready to greedily read them.

So instead of long mass emails, you all forwarding emails to others, me waiting forever for the Yahoo pages to load before I can actually send an email, here's a blog for us. This way, everything is public, and so there's the added benefit of you getting a taste of what it's like to be the only white people living in a town with everyone gawking at you as you walk to the store, kids walking around your house shouting "How are you!" through the windows, people waving to you from outside your windows, people walking through your backyard and digging through your trash thinking that you must have thrown out something good, etc. Needless to say, we don't live very private lives here.

Lots of love, and will write for real soon. Good luck today on your "special event" ;) Kara. Can't wait to hear about it.