Christmas

It´s Christmastime in the city....

I just spent Christmas Eve for the first time away from family and with only one familiar face - for which I was eternally thankful. For those who don´t know I spent 3 days in Minnesota packing 2 big luggage-fulls of crap to survive living in Argentina for 7 mos and when I left Panama I got the first real taste of Latinoamericana ways... I called the airline (Avianca - don´t ever fly with them!) and asked about weight limits on luggage and guess what? 30 kilos and no more, period. Unless you are willing to pay $12 PER extra KILO. So my sweet and wonderful Che and his mom offered to take one of my bags back to the US with them. After crying for about 3 hours and Che being the most wonderful human being on the planet I re-packed all of my possessions in one bag and flew without any further problems to Buenos Aires.

Meli is also one of those wonderful human beings who I happen to treasure. I was unaware but there had been bad weather and the flight was delayed. Furthermore, I was a GENIUS and forgot to email her my ITINERARY! Pinche idiota... Meli, the resourceful and actual genius that she is, investigated (called my daddy) and found out that my last flight was coming in from Columbia so she knew where to find me - except by the time I got to the airport at 7:30 she had been there since about 5:45 (am).

I´m so glad to have such smart people in my life!

Christmas Eve was spent sleeping... I fell into the bed at Meli´s host mom´s appartment after trying hard to be polite and not too grumpy - and slept in a real bed for 10 hours. I woke up and found that we - Meli and I - were required to spend our dinner with the host mom and her family. That was not so fun. Her host mom (sorry Meli) is a lunatic (loca). And Meli had told her 3 months before and a hundred times since then that we had a party planned for that evening.

We escaped that dinner at around midnight (they don´t eat here until about 10 or 11pm) and finally made it through the explosions in the street, past the doggy shit on the sidewalk, and only after going to one measly wrong building and going down one silly wrong street did we make it to a motly party made up of a bunch of lost souls who had no family on Christmas.

By the way, I cried a little because the calling card I had didn´t work and I wasn´t able to call my family on Christmas Eve or Day... (sad face). So this is my official and last MERRY CHRISTMAS to all my family and friends and those other fools who find my blogs interesting.

Love!