One last post from NYC

Well, friends, you may be relieved to hear that this is finally the last post of our trip (some 2 weeks after we have been back in the US of A). All of the pictures are now finally up on flickr. We've had a wonderful time looking through all of them and pretending we are still on vacation. But actually, we are back to working life. Jess started this week and I start very soon...

This blog will now revert to Jess's triathlon blog, so if you want to continue receiving email updates, you can follow Jess's trials, tribulations, and witty commentary on being a 3-sport athlete.

As one final piece of entertainment, here's our "Top 5 Adjustments to Life in the States":

1. Toilet paper goes in...the toilet! In nearly all the places we visited, throwing TP in the toilet was a big fat no-no. Jokes of toilet paper tossers taking down entire towns' sewage systems - at least I thought they were jokes - quickly got us on board. Not until returning did I realize how well I'd been trained. It took us each a good two weeks to break ourselves of the trash can.

2. Openly gay people are everywhere! Oh, how I missed my brethren. We encountered exactly 4 openly gay people in our entire 3 months of travel and all of them were men, two of whom were even Americans! It was actually shocking how few gay travelers there were and what an oddity we seemed to be at times to the European backpackers that we met everywhere. This is an adjustment I'm more than happy to make.

3. The U.S. Postal Service still sucks. Well, this isn't really an adjustment, but rather an excuse to rail against the postal service on my blog. We sent two packages from South America to Jess' parents, one from Argentina which arrived in a timely manner, and one from Chile. The package from Chile never reached their house and when we finally made it home, devastated that so many of our gifts for friends and family had been lost in the mail, and cursing ourselves for trusting a South American country's postal service, we found a package slip in our mailbox. Jess ran to the post office because the slip claimed that the country of Chile had been attempting to send us a box that we had thus far failed to pick up (mind you, we had already filled out both a forward of mail request and - when that didn't work - a hold mail request) and that they intended to send it back to the "sender" the day before we got home. Fortunately, their incompetence meant that we probably had some wiggle room on that date. Jess recovered the package from the postal worker who insisted that she had "screwed up" in filling out the package slip. You decide - here's a photo. Now whose address is under "Sender" and whose is under "Addressee" (sorry, I know it's a little dark).

4. Speedy service in delis and restaurants. Throughout South America, getting someone to take your order at a restaurant is only a little less hard than getting them to bring the check. On the other hand, there is never any pressure to leave! Coming back to New York, the speediness of the service was extremely refreshing and relaxing. However, I also had to readjust to being in and out within an hour, a long line stretching out the door.

5. In the end, nothing has really changed. Perhaps the most surprising thing about coming home was how much everything was exactly as we left it. It had felt, at times, like we were traveling for years. Yet when we arrived home, all the same scaffolding lined the buildings on our block and the same dude was chilling on the front stoop greeting everyone. My office is still working on the same projects and the train is still packed.

Lastly, we just wanted to say thanks for following our South American journey and have a Happy Thanksgiving!