One month.

Started packing, the leaving part has not sunk in yet. I've been slowly amassing a small mountain of things that I want to keep with me while I am down in Venezuela.

There's medicine, and international documents and teaching books and manipulatives and random accessories and doohickies. I know it looks messy but there is method to the madness. Mostly just figuring out what I need to take with me on the plane, what I can keep in luggage, and what I will be sending after the fact. I am taking many journals and my fiddle. I was told that Ciudad Ojeda can get boring at times so I need to entertain myself. It is a city of around 125,000 but due to the heat the streets are pretty vacant. From what I've heard life in western Venezuela is a lot like life in Philadelphia, in the summer, when weather edges towards heatwave status. It is 95* and humid almost every day.

This is my greatest fear. Heat. Not kidnapping, not their Rodents Of Unusual Sizes, not the banana spiders, or anti american sentiment. I fear the heat and I will miss the winter. Albert Camus once wrote:

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. It's a very beautiful and poetic line but I resonate with the opposite. Winter is my season, I like the cold, I like layers, I like snow and the kind of silence that only snowfall brings. To give this up for a year will be torture but there is little growth in comfort. I am hoping that this adventure across the world will live up to my dreamers expectations.

I will most likely bring some TP with me as there has been a recent shortage in the country. You read the right, they have a shortage on toilet paper. More on this later.

I've started spending a few hours a day studying Spanish. I took Spanish classes from 7th grade until my sophomore year of college so I am not going into this completely unprepared but I realized the other day that I kept telling people I was leaving in "Una mesa" which translates to "One table". So I also have my work cut out for me. I have 28 days until I leave and I plan on celebrating and saying goodbyes. Much time and little to do. Wait. Switch that.