Monterey

Justin and I are all settled in here in Monterey, and we don't love it. People here are keep telling us how lucky we are to live in "beautiful Monterey," and even "perfect Monterey," and I'm still trying to figure out what they're talking about. In one sentence they'll tell us how wonderful the weather is, and in the next tell us that this is the summer here and that "it's only going to get colder, it'll get down in to the 40's in July." HOW IS THIS A GOOD THING?! I pretty much hate it here, it's not an ugly place by any stretch of the imagination but the weather is terrible, the place is overcrowded, overpriced, and you have to drive for miles just to find a store like Target, Wal-Mart, Kohls...pretty much any place that you'd want to buy normal household products without having to sacrifice your financial future to do so. Some lady at church was telling us how much she loves the view of the harbor, the same harbor that Justin and I both think looks ugly and cluttered. Either we're just really, really not cut out for this place, or we're the only people around here that are willing to just come right out and say that it's not that great here.

My Russian classes are at last underway, so at least the time here has started to tick down already. This does bring me to another thing that I really hate about this place. For some inexplicable reason the cadre here are some of the most negative people I've encountered in the Army thus far. Well maybe that's because they live here...regardless, every briefing goes along the lines of "your life here is going to suck, your family relationships are going to suffer, you will have no free time, you will be in a constant state of mental exhaustion, you will most likely fail to learn your language, the military is getting smaller, when you fail you will get kicked out, this is going to be a terrible experience, you will wish that you had not agreed to come here, you will get placed on academic probation and lose even more time with mandatory study hall..." or my personal favorite "when students are about to go down in flames they have a propensity to try and take other more successful students down with them..." Really? Talking about us "going down in flames" in an introductory briefing is supposed to be encouraging? So weird... I've discussed this with other people in my class, and we've all pretty much agreed that at this point the hardest part is trying to shut out everything they've told us about not being able to do this, and trying to make it happen. I'm only a few days into the Russian itself, so I can't really comment on how hard it's actually going to be yet. I have the alphabet down and can say very short little Russian phrases about a soldier, chair, table, window, and blackboard. That's about it though.

Although I don't love Monterey, I am grateful every day that I wake up off post in our little apartment, and come home every evening to spend time with my husband. I'd probably be "going down in flames" already if he hadn't come along. We don't love it here, but it's only a year and we're going to take advantage of our proximity to cool things in San Francisco and up in the bay area while we can.