…shopping

We’ve been doing a lot of shopping lately. We’re not entirely sure what we’ll need, or what the prices might be like when we get to Dhaka, and neither of us brought much of anything with us when we left California to get married (we’ve been living in furnished places or with roommates for most of the past years), so we need a lot of stuff.

Mr. Adventure has been focusing on proper clothes and shoes, Mrs. Adventure has been looking for first aid kits and kitchen stuff. Someone else’s blog recommended having some essentials shipped by APO so that they’d be there before the UAB is, so I’m considering what we might wait to get, and what’s best collected now for our HHE shipment. Things that are cheapest on the internet are probably destined for the APO shipment, rather than stockpiling it for UAB/HHE, but some things are are so light and essential, that we’ll need them even in our airplane baggage.

We’ll see how well we do.

…language exams

Mr. Adventure took his end-of-course language exams this week and passed with flying colors, exceeding the requirements for his upcoming post. He’s one inch away from a 3/3 and they recommend he do a few more weeks of one hour classes while he’s in another course and then retest before we go. He agreed, even though they start at 7:30 am. More power to him, those early mornings are not my style.

To celebrate, he checked himself in for some surgery at the local hospital and we’ve been sitting on the couch watching movies to recouperate. He looks a little bit pathetic with his big bandage, but he’ll fit right in at FSI when he gets back. That place is a rehab center, everyone seems to get their elective surgeries and major accidents out of the way while they’re stateside between posts. You can’t turn around without seeing someone in a cast or sling.

We made some last minute plans to head out to the beach at the end of next week, and got one of the last rooms available in Ocean City. Supposedly the place is supremely tacky touristy, like Dollywood at the beach, so I am excited to visit. I gotta love me some tacky touristy stuff.

…language classes

I started language classes at FSI last week. Supposedly, these are “survival” classes, since they only meet for one hour per day. So far, we’ve predominantly learned the unusual letters of the language. Thankfully the class meets for several weeks, because, if I had to survive on what I know so far, I could thank a lot of people, and tell them I am American, but little else. This is one _complicated_ alphabet.

The FSI language courses meet in hundreds of small rooms in a giant building. As you walk in the hallway, you might hear someone shout a greeting in Portuguese while passing a trio speaking something which sounds like it is  probably from central Asia, but might be an obscure dialect of anywhere. It’s a bit of a Babel.

My language lessons will increase by a factor of 5 (though I may drop the survival class) next week because I will be starting the official language class. As a spouse, I am eligible to take language classes on a space-available basis, and thankfully, someone is starting their language training as an employee, so there is room for me. Hopefully I’ll be able to say even more exciting things next week. Maybe I’ll be able to ask for the bathroom and a taxi.