Time keeps slipping away, and these posts don’t make it up until weeks after the events they cover. We threw a combo birthday/farewell part to belatedly celebrate my birthday and Matt’s last days in the country about... oh, a month ago.

This was the first time a lot of our new friends met each other, and the first "US" party that some of the folks from Chile had experienced. Parties here start late (11:30pm-ish) and revolve mainly around drinking, so our extremely early start time of 8:30 and abundance of food (especially the deviled eggs) threw them for a bit. But they caught on quickly... there weren't many leftovers.

Back to Matt: one of our first friends in Chile (he helped to celebrate our first Christmas and first shore explorations), he had been working at the Tromwell language institute. He decided that it was time to return to Texas, where both his lovely girlfriend and grad school were waiting for him.