First Post

Time is disappearing as we get closer to our departure date for China. We are going to be leaving Des Moines, IA in our air-condition-less car on Monday, August 8^th and drive to Salt Lake City, UT. There we will say hi and bye to some friends and family, and drive to Rexburg. After making a deposit to our storage unit and some more hi’s and bye’s, we will drive to Spokane, WA and spend some time with the in-laws, who will graciously accompany us the remainder of the way to Seattle. The cheapest tickets to Beijing were out of Seattle, so we planned this road trip accordingly.

The fateful day is Wednesday, August 17, we board the planes, make a quick stop in San Fran then off to Beijing. The reality is definitely starting to hit. A feeling of nostalgia that has been creeping up on me and is none too pleasant is that of my first months in Argentina. When I was in the Missionary Training Center in Provo, UT, they do their best to inundate you with as much vocabulary and grammar as you can possibly retain… and then some. However, compared to the linguistic dexterity required when you arrive in the country… Well, it’s like trying to teach someone to swim by correspondence. At full throttle it took about 3 months to reach low-level fluency in Spanish, and Mandarin is significantly more challenging, so here’s hoping that 4 months in Beijing will prove sufficient time to see some of it come to conversational fruition.