Pre-summer days: last days in The Van

Today Sunday makes it two weeks since I arrived in Chile! I will write all about it in a bit, but I remembered I had written this stuff below while I was on the plane two weeks ago, but had forgotten to post it:

Kiki getting her tattoo!

Here I am on another plane. Going to Chile now, though.  Wow, the entertainment on planes has improved considerably in the last couple years. Now we all have an individual TV where we can select movies, TV shows and music as we please. You can even make playlists with the songs you like from the different albums. This is LAN airlines, which apparently travels all around South America. Very exciting to be in my first South America trip. This particular flight goes from Los Angeles, to Lima, to Santiago, to Buenos Aires.  From LA to Santiago it’s 13 hours, so it’s like going to Europe.

Seeing how I won't be going back to Vancouver for a year (sigh) I will write about some fun things we did our last days there. So these are eating chocolate and live music. In terms of eating chocolate, we went to an all-you-can eat chocolate fondue place, Capstone Tea in Robson Street (which, unless you’re a huge person that eats a LOT, is actually cheaper if you buy individual platters…) For our live music of the month we went to 560 to Five Alarm Funk. They were not as good as the band before them but the night was so much fun! Anyway back to now---> The last 48 hours were so intense… I had my last final on the last possible day, Thursday. Finishing the exam, I had several things to take care of before leaving for a year, and we also had a magic show to go to, so we didn’t start pacing until 11pm. Ok, so just a quick note on the magic show (which I had already mentioned in another post). It’s this guy from Colombia called Camilo The Magician, and he does mostly card tricks, which are crazy! He has a song written after him, Camilo the Magician by Said the Whale. So the trick that blew my mind was one where a guy picked a card, a girl picked a card, they showed them to audience, cards back in the deck, shuffle shuffle, Camilo took one card from the deck, tore it in two, and it was half and half the two cards the guy and the girl had picked! All of this with intensive shuffling involved in between. No idea how he did it. 

So after the show we came home to pack , and we packed and packed and packed all night long! We watched the Royal Wedding, of course. I watched because I was up anyway, but it’s not like I would have woken up at 2 am to watch the live streaming, unlike my mum and sister who did do that. I thought the dress was beautiful, and that the cameras shouldn’t have filmed William’s head from the top that much, focusing on his bald spots. It’s weird that we still have royalty now… a king, seriously??

I hate packing. It’s so stressful, especially getting rid of stuff. I never want to get rid of anything, what if I will ever, maybe, potentially need that thing I’m throwing out one day. This is stupid, but I can’t help it. Especially books. Plus I had a keyboard and the stand and a Christmas tree and the drying racks…  so much stuff. After an all-nighter packing, I transferred all the boxes to my neighbours’ place, because they were scheduled to leave the next day while I was scheduled to leave at noon. I went to work, to give my last tour. So the other day Vale and I got sick at the same time, and lost our voices at the exact same time too, so I had no voice for the tour But I did it with Quinn which was awesome. It was sad saying bye to my Friday team mates, our Friday tour groups were so much fun.

After I got back, there were already people in our place. Housing didn’t clean before the new residents moved in, so they got a mess of a house, ew, I sure wouldn’t want to be them. On the plus side, though, they got all the cool stuff we left, such as an awesome NY poster on the stairs oh yeaahhh and food and shampoo (unopened). I spent all afternoon with my neighbours and then Nicki let me store ALL of my boxes in her storage space in her Marine Drive apartment, so I transferred everything from Fairview to MD in a taxi van at 11 pm when Nicki got home. Then we slept for like 2 hours and the taxi came at 3 am to take me to the airport as my flight left at 6 am. And Sharon went to the airport at 3am to say goodbye too, she's such a sweetie. 

Now that I have like 5 hours until we get to Peru I will go to sleep.