Meetings

And now for something completely different.

Does anyone else remember how Monty Python would always start their skits off with that phrase? And since it represents our life of late, I thought I would start off with it.

How have things been completely different? Just this - in the past two weeks, we've had a language consultant come to check us on our project, and a couple of guys from other parts of the country to check our team and our work here and find out how things were going.

All of this has meant lots of meetings. First, it meant lots of meetings for those of us on the team so we could kind of crystallize somewhat exactly what our future plans are. What kinds of things each of us will do, timelines, that sort of thing. After we met as a team and finessed our plan, we met together with these two guys from other areas, and they gave their input. During all of this, we had our language consultant also in town, and she was checking on how we are doing in culture and language acquisition. So it was a busy time, and involved a lot of this:

That is to say, a lot of sitting around, drinking coffee, and talking. Planning, discussing, arguing ... well, of course not arguing. I mean, we're always in agreement on every detail, of course! ;-)

Fortunately, not all the meetings were about big picture things. Below is our language consultant, who last visited us in October and now came back to see how we were doing. We don't have any pictures of the things we did with her, but it basically involved her observing how we go about our culture and language study and then offering tips to improve it. Of course, there was also the dreaded level check, which actually was a source of pretty good news, all things considered.

Both Bobbie and I are at a level of Basic High in T, which means that we're close to entering the Progressing Level where you can create more freely with the language and just generally start getting out of the box of memorized phrases and variations on them. I'm really looking forward to that level; it will make getting around and just making friends much easier to do. We were both encouraged, especially Bobbie who's doing really well in T and loving it! Not to say that I'm not, it's just that the difference between this language and last has been more notable in Bobbie's case.

Of course, we did take one afternoon off the formal meetings to just take the guys around town and show them the sights. Here they are, looking suitably touristy, snapping photos of the snow-capped mountains across the river.

We also took them downtown to the big Buddhist prayer wheel. I don't think we've ever posted a picture of it on here without snow on it, so here it is wearing the latest in summer fashions - no snow.

And lastly, just for the sheer purtiness of it, a shot of the sunset. T-land is certainly a beautiful place to live!

Thanks for lifting us up during these meetings, which I think were really helpful to our overall work here. Please continue to do so as we return to regular culture and language study tomorrow.