Pictures and an Update

I know I´ve been totally lazy about updating the blog, and I apologize for subjecting you to Nate´s crazy ramblings. Here are some pictures to satisfy the visual learners out there (and to prove that we do, in fact, have some friends). These pictures are from a birthday/St. Patrick´s Day party we had last month.

This is Janine (who works with us at Comunicorp) and Fiona (who lives above us). Janine is Canadian and Fiona is a Scot. I don´t know why that´s important, but everyone asks and knows about where everyone else is from, so it´s a habit I´ve also gotten into. Here is Nate being positively dwarfed by two Chileans. This almost never happens. These Chileans are abnormally huge. On the left is Gonzalo, Janine´s boyfriend, and on the right is Eric, who drives the metro. We were super fascinated by his driving of the metro (he´s That Voice... it´s like the Wizard of Oz), and he consequently made fun of us because he says all gringos are fascinated by the fact that he drives the metro.
Here is Fiona and her Chilean boyfriend German. It was her party and German made the birthday cake all by himself! His name is pronounced (hermán, by the way).

Nate expressing his feelings about socializing with people for more than two hours.
Janine and Louise, a Kiwi with a Chilean boyfriend as well. (I am the only gringa in the country not dating a Chilean, by the way).

More pictures to follow of our trip to the beach last weekend.

Short update on our lives: We are on our last week of work, and we leave for the States on April 28th. It´s weird to have the departure so close, because it makes you ration and plan certain aspects of your life in ways you normally wouldn´t. For example, we´ve tried to plan it so that we won´t have to do any more laundry before we go. This means there is no unnecessary changing of clothes or underwear if it means we´ll have to do another load of laundry. The last day here we´ll hopefully be wearing our last remaining pair of clean underwear and our last set of clothes. This is not an easy thing to do, but we´re trying to make it work. Laundry here is ridiculously expensive. We´ve also stopped buying things we may not use up in a weeks´ time, like spices, certain kinds of food, toilet paper, new bottles of anything, etc. It´s an amusing challenge to see if we can time everything just so. If everything goes as planned, we´ll be using the last bit of soap, the last square of toilet paper, the last grain of rice on the last day of our stay here.

We stop work on Friday, and then we have a week to mess around, visit any places nearby that we may have missed, buy any souvenirs we´ve put off buying, say goodbye to friends, and get our lives packed into 4 checked bags and 2 carry-ons. We arrive in the States on April 29th, and we´ll be up in the DC area on May4th. See everyone soon!