Gearing up

I'm leaving for Providence tomorrow, where I will have a two day hiatus before continuing my journey on to the land of frankincense. (bet you didn't know THAT huh?-- Oman was historically one of the main sources of frankincense in the world. It doesn't export all that much today, but from what I can tell, its frankincense is still considered to be of high-quality and is used locally a fair bit).

So, I really should be packing and making sure I have everything I need. I bought a TSA approved lock today, so my bag can be secure and searchable--which is really what you want in these situations.

I'm pretty excited I think. I'm definitely glad I get to stop back and see everyone at Brown before heading off, and it feels good to finally be on the verge of actually studying abroad. There comes a point where I really don't care whether I'm not prepared, or whether I'll be surprised or disappointed when I get there or anything like that. It's something entirely new, so I know my attitude is the key to almost everything--and I think I'm getting there. I'm preparing myself for a"oh hey, our airplanes broken...what an opportunity for adventure!" type of mindset.

It should be good. I believe that history will end in a good way, so optimism is justifiable in tons of situations--even quite ordinary ones. Even quite awful ones actually--which is why I'm more excited than worried. And my excitement is vague. There are good and bad things in life, and there will probably be a disproportionate amount of both of those for me this semester. I'll try to share my joys at the good, and struggles with the bad in here--or at least some of them anyways.

And I'm hoping for a fair amount of joy. So if there's ever a sentence in this blog in all caps with exclamation points, just imagine me in front of you waving my hands around, yelling, and conveying everything with my face and hand movements.

Oh man!

Oman!

Heeeeere I come!

I'm figuring I'll set the bar low for expectations from this blog. If you're looking for extraneous and disorganized accounts of what I'm doing, somewhat more organized and very serious analysis of irrelevant topics, and very very serious but doomed attempts to try to be funny...you, my blog-reading cyber-friend, have googled your way to the right url!

I'm still in Colorado, but I'm thinking about packing, so that kinda justifies a blog post here.

Here's just a small taste of what is to come:

I feel I've done a poor job of preparing myself so far. I've practiced Arabic far less than I had planned to, and have done less reading in preparation than I had hoped to. I hadn't anticipated how much shopping I would have to do, so a fair amount of that still has to be done as well. But you know, everyone starts out slowly. Not everyone, but it happens. I, at least, have had many a poor starts to things that ended up working out quite well in my life, so I'm not even concerned yet. I have managed to learn over the break, and I feel like I'm getting a better idea of what things will be like. I'm excited to learn, though.

Ok, so yeah, I've been packing. Dare to read on if you dare. I won't even promise to post updates regularly, but I'll try.