it's the night before

...my official departure for Ghana is tomorrow. Newark, Frankfurt and then Accra.

I spent most of Sunday flying/sleeping on airplanes and Sunday night getting tipsy at some dive bar in downtown Philadelphia with an old friend from middle school. The  evening started with some good Italian food (note: if you know me at all, you would know that I hate Italian, so this was a big deal) and took a total spontaneous turn with a slight touch of peer pressure and ended with me having a great conversation with a 27 year old Somalian cab driver about life. Totally worth the 11 dollars ride (that's the upside of having a low alcohol tolerance again, thanks NIH meds!)

This morning I did a short walk around the Historic District of Philadelphia. Actually, more like, doing an extensive tour of the Liberty Bell and skimming everything else, i.e: Independent Hall, Ben Franklin's house, Bessy Ross's house. If it wasn't for the excessive amount of police siren through out the day, it would have been super romantic.  

Anywho, our training was the usual pre-country departure talk, safety, food, cultures. Most of this I have heard before from AB training and orientation as well as Peace Corps materials so it wasn't too a too exciting event. The rest of the people finally arrived for the training and there are 25 or 26 of us, I'm not too solid on the number. There is a sprinkle of ethnicity here and there but the majority are white and apparently 4-5 of us are from CA. Something about this liberal hippy state I guess. 

We're not leaving until 1pm tomorrow so there is a group of twenty something Peace Corps peeps getting drunk in a karaoke bar somewhere in downtown Philly as I'm typing/joining in 10 mins.