New Semester, Burgeoning Vocabulary

After another brief silence due to our office moving last week I am back in the internet game. The moving was exciting. The main feature of the Aparri Bible Seminary campus has been this construction project. Previously our offices had been in what was supposed to be classrooms. As phase three of the project nears completion, the space that is supposed to be the office was finally completed and now the faculty and staff exist in a new office space. Phase three is nearly complete, and they were able to accomplish a lot while the students were on break these past few weeks. Mostly things like putting glass in windows and tiling floors. The campus here has changed a lot during the six months (!!) I've been here. I'm anxious to see how things will continue.

In the "huh" category, I found out that all saints day and all saints eve are holidays here in the Philippines, so last week I was the only one in the office on Monday and Tuesday. That worked out ok, we still didn't have internet so I managed to get some work done.
Last weekend I went to a fellowship in a place called Dugo (I think). It is an area of a city called Camalaniugan which is just down the road from Aparri towards Tuguegarao and Manila. My friend Jay randomly showed up Saturday morning and asked if I wanted to go, so we went with our friend Kit. Public transportation here is unbelievable, by the way. It cost us 20 pisos each (approximately $0.50) for a 5km ride in what was basically a small truck with benches in the bed. By way of comparison, a ticket to Manila on the nicest bus costs about $35. That's for a trip that is more than 600km/375 miles. Public transportation works pretty well over here. And honestly, it has to. Otherwise no one would ever get anywhere since most people don't have a car and a scooter is only practical up to a certain distance.

It's good to see the students back. For a while it was nice that it was quiet around here for once, but it slowly got a little quieter than I preferred towards the end of the semester break. I'm interested to see how this semester goes. I'll have the change in subjects that I mentioned previously. It also looks like we are going to re-arrange the care groups; so I'll have a new group of students to bother more often with by bad Ilocano.

Speaking of Ilocano, when we moved into the new office I asked about how to say a specifc phrase in Ilocano, 'I'm very busy.' Adu ti trabahok. (I think). That's a new pronoun series for me, the "ko" series is one of the things I'm just learning about. The ko series are possessive pronouns. Exciting stuff if you are a language nerd.

I hope you all are well, I'm missing you.

Nick