The Final Countdown!

Cue that song from some Swedish band! This is officially the (dada duuh duh, dada duhdada)Final Countdown! I have just 10 days of work left. Thankfully, as I've said before, time is flying by at a numbing speed thanks to the fact that I've been so busy with work and everything else. It might also help that I've really been enjoying playing my new video games and reading my biography on Che Guevara. All of this has helped to ease the pain of working with idiots and assholes. I found out that I'm being moved to another branch on Friday because a photographer is coming into the branch I normally work at to get some pictures of everything. I guess this means I'm not an attractive foreigner. Luckily, while the other branch is slightly further away, it's also at a really fun mall, in addition to being pretty slow and the only staff member is actually a decent human being. The mall part isn't such a big deal due to the fact that I have $120 to live off of for the next 8 days, but other than that, it should be nice.

One quest that I have recently taken up is collecting the assorted poker chip key chains that are given away with each bottle of coke/diet coke here. There are 32 different chips, one for each team playing in the World Cup. They seem like they'd be fun to use when I'm playing cards when I need tokens to keep track of various things, so I'm trying to get as many of them as I can before I leave. I'm also trying to find as many Mexico ones as I can to give the family when I get to Mexico. As you will notice from the picture, I haven't found any yet. I feel rather self-conscious when I'm at the convenience stores, so I only look through the coolers trying to find the elusive Mexico key chains for a short period of time before putting the bottles back and settling for some other country.

I am trying to drum up some interest in Soccer, because my future brother-in-law, Hector, loves soccer, as does the rest of the family. They got me a Mexican World Cup jersey, which Christian is wearing in the picture below (along with Hector and Carolina, my future mother-in-law), and I'm starting to get into it. I figure the rest of the world loves the sport, maybe it's not so bad! It can't be as bad as Baseball, that much is obvious.

The next big hurdle is packing everything up. The biggest task is going to be fighting the urge to just leave a ton of stuff behind, which I may end up doing anyways. It just seems easy to leave sweaters and things of that nature behind when I'm moving to a tropical climate. Christian told me I would be able to get by with wearing Sandals, pants, and a nice shirt to work if I get a job as a teacher in Mexico, and that absolutely has to be the nicest thing I've heard yet. After 5 months, I can say with certainty that I am not the type of person who likes wearing a tie and long-sleeved dress shirt everyday. I long to find myself in a cluttered office as a college professor, having freedom to enjoy teaching without the unnecessary restraints of a heartless company watching over me, but that is still years off, so I'll simply have to keep that in mind as a goal and work steadily towards it. For now, I'll have to settle for working on my Spanish so I have an easier time finding a job when I get to Mexico! With that in mind, I'll leave everyone with a countdown that has been adjusted to my newly purchased ticket to Mexico and Karla with her cat, Fido, waving goodbye from their Hammock!