Starting to Roll

Well i received my Itinerary today.. i will depart from Cincinnati at 4:10 pm on wednesday September 10 on a straight shot to LA international. after a 6 hour layover in LA. other Exchangers and me will depart at 11:30 pm to Seoul Korea and arrive at 4:15 am local time.. then at 8:25 we will all leave Seoul for Vladivostok, Russia and arrive at 1:15pm. over all.. its about 8,000 miles of travel. i will Arrive on Russia on september 10th for Orientation till the 12th. then Roxane Perrier from Lyon, France and i will depart for our host city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk in the far east Russian island of Sakhalin on the 13th.. Roxane Perrier already arrived in Russia last week, so i hope i wont get lost when im with her. i will immideately go to live with my host family the Sergeevas.

they dont speak english (YESS!!!!) and their daughter Daria is an Berrein Springs, Michigan doing her Exchange year in the US (she is the only one of them who speaks english). they have an 8 year old girl and it really seems to be an exciting experience. or as Daria describes it "crazy at first".

so i guess some information about the place im staying would be in need.

my host city is Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, Russia on the far east Sakhalin island. the southern half of the Island was taken over by Japan after the Russo-Japanese war in 1904. Russia took the island back after WWII and renamed it Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. the city is the capital of the Sakhalin Oblast. and is just 100 miles north of the country i wanted to go to for my entire life. Sakhalin is known for being an extremely diverse place in Russia. its also known for having the biggest off shore oil reserves in the world by major english speaking companies. the companies keep their headquarters in the south. mostly Yuzhno. although technically ill be living in Uspenskoye village which is under the juristiction of the Aniva Region. i will go to School in Yuzhno at Gymnazium #1 of A.S Pushkin and do pratically everything in Yuzhno. school in Yuzhno started on september 1st. so i will miss 2 weeks of that, which will be a nice shocker when i arrive in Yuzhno finally. my grades for school in Russia wont count, instead, to get my english credit for a year, i will be doing an independent study of Russian Literature, which will be graded by my teacher back here in the states. so it looks like i have a plan on what ill be doing for the insanly long trans pacific flight... hello Leo Tolstoy's thousand page book "War and Peace".. and if anyone is reading my blog from start to finish. i would like to apologize for the awfulness my English grammer will take in the next year, yea its pretty bad now. but i dont know if it can get any worse over the year. we will just have to see.

as for packing, i am all set. except for the last minute items, but who doesnt pass over those whenever theyre packing. i was so excited to go that i actually finished packing a couple weeks ago. and i just know that in Russia i most likley wont pack until the very last night. :)