Well, the time is almost here. Come Monday, I'll be in Philly for staging. Right now, I've just finished six hours of packing. I know it might sound like a lot of packing, but in reality, there wasn't a whole lot to pack. The reason it takes so long is because you have to pack smartly. You can't pack for the Peace Corps in an hour. We have weight and dimension restrictions that have to be met. We're allowed two checked bags and one carry-on. The checked bags together have to weigh no more than 80lbs and each bag can't exceed 62in of linear dimentions (length + width + height). This results in a lot of shifting and forced condensing of our luggage. It's hard work. Now all I have left to do is print out the photos I'm going to take and pack my carry-on bag.

Yesterday, I spent most of the day up at UMBC meeting up with a bunch of friends that are still there. I was pretty lucky in running into a lot of people that I didn't really expect to. Like my old roommate from my Junior year, and two of the other RAs from last year that graduated with me (which was pretty cool). All-in-all, I got to talk to everyone that I wanted to.

A little over 24 hours before staging and I'm still not feeling the nerves that I expected to. I'm pretty excited to meet my fellow volunteers and finally fly over to Africa. But I'm not as nervous as my friends said they'd be in my situation. But I guess that's a good thing. Yay! I'm going to Africa!!!