Near the крај of training

Since we arrived in Macedonia on September 11th, we've been in pre-service training, and finally tomorrow we will all be sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers in a ceremony to be held near the city of Kumanovo. The current US ambassador and high-level Macedonian government officials will be in attendance, along with two members of each home stay family from the training communities of Kratovo, Probishtip, Lozovo, and Romanovce. It will be an ironic moment for me, since the oath of service will be take is almost identical to the one I had to swear to back when I was commissioned as an officer in the Navy in 2004. Just replace "United States Navy" with "US Peace Corps". I suppose that means I have no excuse to screw it up! In addition to various speeches and presentations by each training community, I also have the honor to jointly speak on behalf our training class and will give a short speech in the Macedonian language to recognize the people who helped us get through training and prepared us for our future work sites. My friend and fellow volunteer Carly and I prepared the speech in English, and she will give the Albanian language translation. It is a bit humorous that the largest audience I've ever had for a presentation will listen to me speak in Macedonian rather than English. Once the ceremony is over we will have a big Thanksgiving dinner with all of our host families courtesy of the dozens of turkeys flown in from the US for the event. Apparently last year's dinner was quite a free-for-all for food, so it should be an entertaining and fun experience. On Friday I will leave Kratovo for my permanent work site in Obleshevo, and I will also meet my new host family for the next two years. I just found out today that this will be a different family/home from what I visited a few weeks ago, but it sounds like a good living situation.

This past weekend Mary and I managed to get out of our training communities for an excursion to the wine-growing region of Macedonia in the Southeast, and stayed overnight at the Popova Kula winery in Demir Kapija. While we only had about 24 hours in the area, it was totally worth every minute, as we had a chance to walk around a beautiful river/gorge area, taste several different types of wines, and had a incredibly nice dinner at the winery. The winery itself is one of the most impressive places I've visited yet in Macedonia. Everyone at the winery we met was extremely professional, spoke fluent English, and it was just plainly obvious that they knew what they were doing there. It reminded me of the nicer wineries I've had a chance to visit in California, only with friendlier staff. Here are some additional photos: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150374088984117.350403.525244116&type=1&l=f976d5d6c3