A Few Things Before I Leave

Well, I will be leaving for the airport in about 6 hours... Leaving the house at 3:30am, with my flight leaving at 7:30. Got a nearly 4 hour flight to Chicago, then a 3 hour layover. Then about an 8 hour flight to London where I arrive at about 6am local time. Then I am hoping to meet up with a few of my relatives in London that morning... Supposed to meet them on Baker Street in front of Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. We'll see how that goes... Then after a 16 hour layover in London I fly via Emirates Airlines to Dubai, where I chose to layover for about 24 hours to meet my friend from UW's English as a Second Language program, Abdulla, who will show me around all over, I hope. Then I fly out of Dubai the morning of the 9th, and arrive in Sana'a after a couple hour flight. At the Sana'a airport I am supposed to be met by representative of the school, Osman, who will have the original copy of my visa (they emailed me a scan of the document a few days ago) and will escort me to the school/housing.

A few days ago I met up with Gary (check out his blog) who recently returned from 5 months studying at CALES in Sanaa. We met at Starbucks in Seattle for at least 2and half hours, and he gave me lots of valuable info. I think it's really great to be able to talk to people who have studied in Yemen, because there is such a lack of resources about studying in this country. However, this seems to be changing as there are a number of blogs on the topic. Here are a few to look into if you are interested:

Gary (linked above) from Seattle who studied at CALES for 5 months

http://mkohlmeier.blogspot.com/
Mike from Omaha who studied this summer at CALES

http://arabicstudent.blogspot.com/
Ben who recently arrived to study and work at YLC

http://isaacc7.livejournal.com/
Isaac will be studying at CALES in October

http://www.xanga.com/mdkuehl/
Will be working at YLC for 2 years

http://polyglotpoetry.blogspot.com/
A Student at YLC, I believe

http://followkim.blogspot.com
Kim from Seattle area and teaching English at MALI for two years while also learning Arabic

"English Tom's" Blog, traveled to Yemen in October 2005

Janet taught English with AMIDEAST in 2005, I believe

Becky of Arabia studied for a little bit at CALES

There are some more blogs I know, but that is all I have links to at this moement.

Got to get back to packing... More when I arrive.