The Shetterlys in Vietnam: Chillin in Cali

Hi, and welcome to the blog if you've never been here before! Chances are good you heard about this through our newsletter or in an email, and we're glad you've stopped by.

Right now we're in cloudy southern California--the weather was gorgeous when we left Seattle on Tuesday, but by the time we landed in Ontario, CA it looked like the Pacific Northwest again. Bleak, rainy, with a lot of freeways and 70s era strip malls. Kind of like a supersize helping of Tacoma.

The last few days have consisted of visiting some friends in the area, meeting up with the staff and other teachers from our organization at the airport, eating a lot of food, and sitting through a great deal of good but slightly overwhelming information. Orientation has been scrunched into basically two days for us which is great in the sense that we get to head to Asia quickly, but our heads are brim full of organizational info right about now.

We have one more day of orientation tomorrow and then it's off to LAX for our overnight flight to Hong Kong. We leave a little after 10:00 PM California time and get in around 5:40 AM Hong Kong time. I think it's around a 15 hour flight. Bleah.

One big praise: When we arrived in CA two days ago, our organization still hadn't received our passports with our Vietnam visas back from the consulate. The consulate got our passports in late January, right before Tet--the Vietnamese New Year. And unlike us stodgy Americans who take just one day off of work for New Years, the Vietnamese take around two weeks off, so they didn't so much as look at our passports until mid-February. Considering the fact that our flight was already booked, we were starting to get a wee bit nervous that our passports were sitting in an office in downtown San Franciso. They showed up this morning, though, with a little over a day to spare. So it looks like we're goin'.

In other news, Steven bought a beard/nosehair trimmer on a great sale at Ross yesterday. Seeing as how neither he nor Joelle currently have a beard you can guess which attachment was used the most.