Fort Knox, Day 3

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Well, I safely arrived at Fort Knox, KY, on Sunday after two short, uneventful flights. I'm staying in an old barracks with a group of other CULP cadets, primarily a team leaving tomorrow for Ghana (and working with CCS like my team). I'm also with 3 other China cadets. On Thursday, the four of us will fly to Newark, NJ, stay in a hotel for the night, and meet the 6 others (all from West Point) on our team up in Newark on Friday before we fly to Beijing. Our one cadre member, also from West Point, will join us there too.

The four of us China men (that's what the Ghana group has affectionately started calling us, as they greatly outnumber us; there's been some fun rivalry/joking between us China men and the Ghana group) have been tagging along with the Ghana group, going through standard Army pre-deployment preparation (aka new id cards and tags, immunizations, threat and safety briefings, etc.; pretty boring stuff).

This has all gone quite smoothly, with the exception of the immunizations...I had to get 5 shots, blood drawn, and a TB test, one after another. Within minutes of receiving all my shots, I passed out in the chair. Fortunately, this time, I was sitting down and didn't break anything (for those of you who know about the embarrassing nose incident). This was totally unexpected, since I've given blood and had multiple shots before without any problems (so obviously it has nothing to do with me being a weakling ;-). But someone had to be "that guy", right? And everyone's had fun with it, so it was probably worth it just for the entertainment value.

And now I'm just chilling out in a cafe, getting my wi-fi on, getting my caramel macchiato on...looks like free time the rest of the day! Maybe I'll drop a second blog post in one day! Crazy...

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