Just wondering why we're here?

Da jia Hao! Hello everyone and greetings from Beijing. If you were wondering, Ao Fu Ran is my Chinese name. It was given to me by my teachers back in the States while studying Chinese. This is my first of many blogs but probably not as many as my other half. She'll likely be the main contributor. I've received questions from time to time from friends and family asking what it is I'm doing. So I thought it appropriate to finally post something to give everyone a basic idea of exactly why we're here in the first place.

I'm currently a Marine Corps higher education and training program known as the Foreign Area Officer (FAO) program. The basic purpose is to give an officer a Master's level education, language training, and then in-country language immersion and cultural training in a specific region and designate the officer a specialist in their respective region. A FAO's knowlegde not only includes culture and language but also economic, political, and military aspects of a country or region. The officer can later be assigned to positions that require regional specialists such as regional combatant commands, expeditionary units deployed to the FAOs respective region and assistant defense attache' positions at American Embassies across the globe.

So this is basically the third phase of my education. As you may know I was in Monterey the last 2 and a half years earning an MA in East Asian Security Affairs (phase I) and then attending a language institute for Basic Mandarin (phase II). The main purpose of this final year in the program here in China is to immerse myself in the language and culture. This will be accomplished through my regular attendance at a language institute in Beijing and through regional travel. Most of my travel will be in China visiting the various provinces. However, during the year we plan to do quite a bit of international travel in order to experience other areas within the Asia-Pacific region. Singapore and Vietnam are just a couple of the other countries we plan to visit.

That's it in a nutshell. Now of course we decided to put this blog together to keep friends and family updated but the other important purpose of this blog is to help out our fellow FAO friends and their families who will soon be taking our place. We want to provide as much information and as many lessons learned as we can in order to make their transition as smooth as possible. AND for those friends and family who may plan to travel to China someday hopefully there are a few tips that are useful for you as well. We'll keep you updated. Zai Jian! See you later!