The Countdown Continues...

In today’s countdown news: it’s 30 days (exactly one month) until I leave!! I’m starting to get just a little bit excited… And also a tad impatient!

After having been busy with practical preparations for several months, it feels strange to only have a short list of small jobs left to do. Sometimes I worry that I must be forgetting something important. Surely there is something that I ought to be doing! So, not knowing what else to do with myself, I have busied myself with Christmas preparations.

For the first time in my life, I have completed all of my Christmas shopping, wrapped every gift, made my Christmas cards and begun writing the cards before the beginning of December. (I’m usually the one complaining if I so much as see a Christmas decoration or hear a Christmas carol before December!) I must admit that I shall be glad to escape the pre-Christmas stupidity that seems to descend upon our shopping centres in a manner beyond all reason!

So I’m not sure how I’m going to occupy myself during the rest of this month until I leave, but I guess it won’t be in preparing for Christmas. Perhaps it will include more adventures such as the one my friend and I had today, during which the most frequently used phrase was, “What could possibly go wrong?”! 

Fun With Foreign Currencies

Somebody gave me my first Filipino pesos a couple of days ago! They kind of remind me of Paraguayan guaraníes in that 1) a handful of money is not necessarily worth very much, and 2) they are paper (unlike Aussie dollars), with each denomination having a unique colour scheme (unlike U.S. dollars). I don’t mind this similarity, but I do hope that the Filipino coins are not like Paraguayan coins!

During the time I was living in Paraguay, several denominations of coin had about four completely different (different size, different colour) versions in circulation. It can be hard enough to figure out the coins of a different currency without an added complication such as this! (I think I probably figured out U.S. coins just before I was about to leave, after having used them for 16 months. Trying to use 25 cent coins when I was used to 20 cent coins really messed with my head!)

Another special feature of Paraguayan coins was that they were worth so little that supermarkets often gave change in the form of a handful of lollies (candy, my American friends!), rather than messing around with the smaller coins. This practice always amused me.   

Anyway, it’s now 38 days until I leave, so it’s not long now until I’ll be spending the money pictured above and attempting to make sense of the Filipino coins that start filling my wallet!!

The Countdown Is On...

The countdown is on… It is now 53 days until I leave!! I realize that 53 may seem like a rather random and insignificant number; it’s just the day I happened to get around to updating my blog! :-)

I have been tracking the weeks until I leave for a while now, because I leave on a Sunday and it’s often on Sundays that people ask me when I’m leaving. I have only begun counting the days, however, since accomplishing two important tasks:

1) I managed to get all the necessary stamps, seals and signatures on my paperwork to allow me to apply for a working visa in the Philippines. This was no small feat. I spent four days walking around the city before I was able to successfully obtain what I needed.

2) I sealed up my packing boxes and said goodbye to (some of) my stuff. My boxes should be part of a shipment that leaves this week. Hopefully they will arrive in Manila at approximately the same time I do.

...and so the countdown is on!!