I get what's known as "home leave" between overseas assignments, designed with this idea that you need time to re-acclimate to America since you have been away for so long. Due to reasons I won't bore you with, I was able to take every single day of the home leave I had accrued = 32 business days = 45 days! We did not plan it out in advance, thinking we would rest, relax, catch up with family and friends, do fun and impromptu things with our son, and just enjoy being in the U.S. Bad idea, and lesson learned! Home leave turned out to be quite stressful and unhappy (see previous blog post, and due to general transition angst), not very restful (had we forgotten we have an active child who needs time and attention?), cold, and we spent approx. two whole weeks just sick with some kind of bug! Nevertheless, I won't malign the whole concept of home leave. And we did enjoy parts of it, like my mother's home-cooked food, spending time with family and friends, restaurants and food in general in the U.S., Target (I could go on about this one thing alone but will spare you)... Lesson learned for next time though is that we will have a plan, we will take trips to vacation-type places (Disney, here we come?), and make a focused effort to schedule the time off with things to do to avoid what happened before. Of course, watch, I'll never get this much time off again!
After seven weeks of home leave, we were in Washington, DC for 10 weeks of Hindi training. M started with the beginner's class, and I was in a one-on-one advanced class. I think he got a lot out of it, and he would agree, but I wish he had learned to speak it more versus learning to read but not have much of a vocabulary. In my case, I found my training would be exhilarating, challenging, frustrating, tiring, and all-consuming (for that last bit, I chose to make it that way). I stopped consuming books, magazines, news, TV, movies in English and instead did so in Hindi. I spoke Hindi before, and when I tested in 2010, it was at level 1+/2. Hindi is not what we speak at home; it is a language I learned while in school in India, and retained mostly through Bollywood and conversations with taxi-drivers when visiting India. The 10 weeks of training was to get me to level 2/2, the minimum. I knew I could do better and expected it of myself (is that a surprise to any of you?)... and I'm proud to say 10 weeks of training later, I am at a 3+/3+. If you care to know what all these levels mean, you can read about the Interagency Language Roundtable scale. Otherwise, let's just say I'm proud of myself for making the most of the opportunity given to me, and more importantly, I no longer hesitate in speaking Hindi.
We bought a bunch of stuff we wanted to bring with us to India, we survived another pack-out, we sold our car, and we took care of a great deal of other minor details as it relates to moving (yet again).
After seven weeks of home leave, we were in Washington, DC for 10 weeks of Hindi training. M started with the beginner's class, and I was in a one-on-one advanced class. I think he got a lot out of it, and he would agree, but I wish he had learned to speak it more versus learning to read but not have much of a vocabulary. In my case, I found my training would be exhilarating, challenging, frustrating, tiring, and all-consuming (for that last bit, I chose to make it that way). I stopped consuming books, magazines, news, TV, movies in English and instead did so in Hindi. I spoke Hindi before, and when I tested in 2010, it was at level 1+/2. Hindi is not what we speak at home; it is a language I learned while in school in India, and retained mostly through Bollywood and conversations with taxi-drivers when visiting India. The 10 weeks of training was to get me to level 2/2, the minimum. I knew I could do better and expected it of myself (is that a surprise to any of you?)... and I'm proud to say 10 weeks of training later, I am at a 3+/3+. If you care to know what all these levels mean, you can read about the Interagency Language Roundtable scale. Otherwise, let's just say I'm proud of myself for making the most of the opportunity given to me, and more importantly, I no longer hesitate in speaking Hindi.
We bought a bunch of stuff we wanted to bring with us to India, we survived another pack-out, we sold our car, and we took care of a great deal of other minor details as it relates to moving (yet again).
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