Preparations

Final exams finish tomorrow, and that will mark a significant change in the tone of things in general, since there will be only eight days from that day until the day I leave for Vietnam on Thursday, the 19th of May, with my girlfriend T____, who is a native of Hanoi.

I can't seem to adequately conceptualize the reality of this "trip" - which is essentially that I'm headed off to Hanoi for over three months, that I don't speak more than a few words of Vietnamese, and that once more I will need to address the plethora of cultural issues one-at-a-time as they come, hopefully catching a "head's up" from T____ every now and then, but not really counting on it overall. While it sounds attractive, it really is too much to have her constantly keep an eye on the foreigner.

I will use Thang-Long as a means of addressing the large number of individuals interested in the journey without having to constantly worry about excessive email quantities. For the moment, I'll leave it at this, as there is little to report on, other than how typical life tends to be at Gordon College at this moment, full of a few successes and quite a few, well, unsuccesses. But it'll all go over well, for whatever it's worth.