A Chat With the Granddaughter

I took Jordan out to dinner last Friday so we could catch up on each other's news. She's looking well after being gone to SE Asia for over 5 weeks.

First, when I informed her about the engagement, she squealed, "Oh, that's so cute!" Yeah. We geezers aren't supposed to do things like that, I guess, so when we do, it's just so cute. Well, it's better than several years ago when she saw me kissing him and the reaction was "Yecchhh!"

Yep, definite improvement.

However, I informed her that if she was going to be a bridesmaid and stand there during the ceremony going "That's just so cute," I was going to throw her out of the church. Or wherever.

We hadn't talked since before she left for music camp at St. Olaf in late June. Her mom had told me in a phone call over the lost luggage that she (Jordan) found the girls at camp too snooty and changed her mind about wanting to be a music teacher when she finished college. Jordan confirmed that her mom had gotten it mostly right - for a change - but that she still wanted to go to St. Olaf for college. She just didn't know what for, exactly. But music required lots more instruction starting much earlier in her life.

So, if I've got this right, she wants to go to a very expensive college with no idea how it'll work with her undecided-upon major with all those rich snooty girls who'll be many of the same ones or have the same attitudes as the ones from music camp? Interesting choice.

As for the trip, she mostly loved it. The first week, the one with the elephants, the primary reason she went in the first place, was a big disappointment. First, when they relocated the program from Thailand to Laos due to civil unrest, they settled for a lesser quality program. She got only about two hours a day with the elephants, and the rest touring temples and playing tourist. Second, she spend much of her time upset about the lost suitcase, distracting from her enjoyment.

Her next two weeks were island hopping and diving on the Thailand coast, and that was great fun. That's good, since there was no bonus of community service hours from that particular piece of the trip. They started with four students and ended with two. Both boys got sent home a couple days into the trip for stealing! They were just very lucky that they avoided being arrested there. Jordan thought that part was because the local cops were corrupt and just wanted money to look the other way. I asked Jordan if having half the student load meant now getting twice the attention. She said it didn't work that way. The staff got twice the time off.

The week with the orphans in Cambodia was mostly helping with the outlying facilities of the newly-build orphanage, and I gather not so much working with the orphans themselves, as the trip had actually been advertised. The last week as well struck me as the experience not quite matching the advertising, though the exact details got lost in the overall hearing of the experience.

We discussed how she compared her Rustic Pathways trip this year with the People To People trip a couple years before. Rustic Pathways seems to be much less organized, and much less supervised. I'm thinking she was lucky that there weren't more problems than there were, and also lucky that she'd had the better trip first with all the advance training and knew how to behave, how to deal with setbacks, how to travel to a foreign land.

But she's home, and safe, and has a couple of amazing experiences to remember the rest of her life.