T-minus 36 hours until I leave Tanzania. Tomorrow, I'll be wrapping up the last of the loose ends, signing out of the Peace Corps system, and officially receiving my "R" (as in "RPCV", or "returned peace corps volunteer"). The dream is finally over.
Well, mostly over. Just because I'm leaving TZ doesn't mean I have to go straight home to America.
And, naturally, I won't be: over the next two months, I'll be teaming up with a few friends and taking the circuitous route home... that is, I'll be taking the really, really circuitous route home, across two continents and six countries. It's a blatant attempt to temporarily postpone the inexorable (and rapidly forthcoming) ass-whooping that will come with going back to America, going back to school, and applying to graduate institutions. If I can spend eight weeks in a land of make-believe where I don't have any real-life obligations and can just gallivant around the globe pretending that nothing I do has any consequences, then I'll take it.
Thus, I present to you the itinerary for the months-in-planning, soon-to-be-epic "Paul and Ezra's Manly Trip for Attractive People (But You Can Come, Too!)":
1. Fly into Istanbul in mid-March 2013.
2. ~1 week spent in Turkey: see Turkish stuff. Get fat on baklava and participate in a Turkish oil wrestling tournament.
3. Flight from Istanbul to Odessa, across the Black Sea. Start looking at Ukrainian stuff.
4. ~1 week in Ukraine: Odessa, Kiev, Pripyat (Chernobyl). Shoot AKs wildly into the air while getting radiation poisoning.
5. Flight to Moscow, Russia. Purchase Trans-Siberian Express tickets to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia. Drink heavily to celebrate.
6. ~1 week on the train, via Irkutsk. See Siberia, freeze our asses off. Lose one of our members to a KGB hit squad.
7. ~1 week in Mongolia. Stay in a ger, get lost in the Gobi Desert. Subsist on nothing but dessicated mutton strips, fermented mare's milk, and yak's blood for the duration.
8. Flight from Mongolia to Hong Kong. See Chinese stuff. Invest in an ultra-capitalist, quasi-legal get-rich-quick scheme. Also wash off 6 weeks of accumulated filth. Buy kickass suits.
9. Flight from Hong Kong to Thailand. Enter a back-alley Muay Thai competition and get our asses beat. Observe the Bangkok nightlife
and come back scarred for life.
10. Return to America in mid-May. Not as boys, but men.
10. Return to America in mid-May. Not as boys, but men.
Of course, all of this is subject to change, seeing as we don't really know what we're doing. Regardless, I'll be doing my best to keep posting updates of all our shenanigans/tomfoolery in the upcoming weeks.
Stay tuned!
Hi Paul,
ReplyDeleteSorry to bother you. My name is Ray Blakney and I am an RPCV from Mexico (2006-2008). I hope you've adjusted well to RPCV life. I am working on a 3rd goal project with the PC regional offices and the main office in DC to try to create an online archive to keep the language training material made all over the world from getting lost. I have created a sub-section on the website my wife and I run Live Lingua with all the information I have been able to get to date (from over the web and sent to me directly by PC staff and PCV's). I currently have close to 100 languages with ebooks, audios, and even some videos.
The next step for this project is that I am trying to get the word out about this resource so that it can not only be used by PCV's or those accepted into the Peace Corps, but also so that when people run across material that is not on the site they can send it to me and I can get it up for everybody to use. I was hoping that you could help getting the word out by putting a link on this on your site here, so that people know it is there. There should be something there for almost everybody. It is all 100% free to use and share. Here is the specific page to what we call the Live Lingua Project:
http://www.livelingua.com/project/
Thanks for any help you can provide in making this 3rd goal project a success. And if anybody in your group has some old material they can scan or already have in digital form, and want to add to the archive, please don't hesitate to pass them my email. Thanks and have a great day.