Tomorrow morning I am leaving- I am hoping to be able to continue to update the blog from over there, although i may have to be more circumspect in what i say and how i say things. I kind of went through the past entries and sanitized them a bit.

I just read this amazing book about the history of Xnity in the country that i am going to, and man am I humbled. So much has happened there in the last 50 years, and so many regime and policy changes, and various approaches of the government towards these issues. There is so much i am excited to find out in person from the people who live and work and there.. things that i cant really find out electronically and from a distance

the tourist reports i have read about the city i am going to say that by that country's standards it is pretty clean and doing really well economically because of foreign investment from the country two to the south. ALso and most encouraging for me, it said that the area is filled with beautiful forests, especially in autumn, and that the Chch there is pretty large and growing. I was really saddened though to read the very hard and real stories of the refugees who swim across the border and take refuge in that town- i know i will see those people, and i have no idea how i will respond when i do see them. its hard to imagine what i can offer to people from that very very closed country, a reality that i cannot even begin to comprehend...

am i nervous about going? Yes.... less so than i would have been before going to Lithuania... randoml;y packing up and moving to a country where i know noone is definitely not a new thing for me. and i know far less about This situation coming into it than i knew about LCC coming into that. The things that is scary, but perhaps i may find freeing, is that in Lithuania i always had the pressure to kind of conform or fit in, because i felt like i COULD theoretically, fit in. Let me tell you- there is no way on earth i will be able to fit in there- i know so little about the two cultures, C and K, in which i will be living, i know almost nothing of the languages, and it will be obvious from a first glance that i do NOT belong there. I can still learn to be sensitive, but maybe i will find a bit more freedom to be "me" and just do things that probably a local person wouldn't be able to do.

I must say goodbye to bread, and cheese, and sweets, and all of the european foods i love. i must say goodbye to happy and friendsly indoeuropean languages. I must say goodbye to the jaded and trendy post-Xn environments in which i have grown accustomed to working in and doing my work in.

I must say hello to fish eyes and kimchee, and staring at signs for minutes, seeing if i can make out anything, and becoming functionally illiterate, and learning a whole new system of doing everything. Hopefully i will be also saying hello to good new colleagues and students.

Please p for me, that i will be able to find a (or several) good, encouraging bros, and fairly early on.

Thanks to you readers out there...