Just a short aside: this is a small summary of my time away, from June 29, 2001 until December 16, 2001.
I enrolled in the Discipleship Training School, a part of the University of the Nations, in Lausanne, Switzerland. This is a five or six month school (24 weeks total) in which people from many different nations around the world come together to learn about God, the Bible, and our lives in relationship to Him. 12 weeks are set aside for a lecture phase, in which different world-class speakers come to teach us and prepare us for our lives as Christian disciples. This first phase is brought to fruition in the second phase, 12 weeks of applying what we have learned in the field.
For our lecture phase, we spent 9 weeks in Lausanne, then went to Egypt for 3 weeks, staying in Alexandria, Cairo, and Sharm el Sheik, Sinai.
Our practical application phase began when our class split up: my team of 8 began with 3 weeks in Almaty, Kazakstan. We then travelled by train and bus across China, staying first in Urumqi, then Kuqa, Xian, and Tianjin. We spent most of our time in Tianjin, where we stayed for 3 weeks, out of 5 weeks total in China. We then flew to Korea, where we stayed in Seoul for 3 days, and Pusan for 2. We finished this phase with 2 weeks in Japan, staying in Shimonoseki, Osaka, and Tokyo. We concluded the course with a week in Lausanne as a whole class (of 32 students, 9 staff), before graduating on the 13th of December.