So my day of departure has arrived! Yesterday I went to the gym for the last time (my eyes watered up upon writing that), went out for lunch with my mom and sister, then made the ridiculous trek down to REI to buy a splash guard for a Nalgene for a girl in my PC group. The Cinco de Mayo festival was going on, so Colfax was shut down so it was just complete gridlock – what perfect conditions for me to go flying down the city streets on my bike! So it was a mixed blessing. Then later last night I met my 7th grade teacher to get a PDF version of this enormous Barnetts bike manual – 673 pages in total! So now my bike woes will be solved…permitted I have the right tools o do whatever I need to do – which I don’t.
He gave me a ride down to DCPA where I met Phil to go see The Swell Season concert. The opening band, Jesse James, or John James, or Jake James, or James James, or – you know what? It doesn’t matter. He was one of the worst bands I’d ever heard in my life. Think of Simon and Garfunkel minus any voice range and…singing capabilities really. Just terrible. Some people even gave him a standing ovation. However, I attribute this to the senile nature of the crowd as the average age of the audience had to be in the thousands, and the average musical IQ of the crowd was definitely in the negatives anyway -Thanks KBCO! After that deplorable set was done, Phil and I talked about just that – how bad he really was. Swell Season finally came on though and didn’t fail to impress. They put on an amazing set with Glen Hansard telling some epic story before perhaps every song. His best exclamation was, “This is like when you’re in your garden and you’re kicking your ball at the goalposts that you’ve drawn on the fence. This is like when you kick the ball, and it goes over the fence, over the river, over the town, through and past the next town. Now 4/5ths of you is saying ‘Yea! I kicked the ball that hard!’ and the other 1/5th is saying “F*ck, I want my ball back’”. Excellent.
But like I said, it was a really good concert and I was glad it was the last one I’ll see for the next 2 and some odd years.
I got to bed at around midnight and woke up at around 4:30 – only because my alarm wasn’t loud enough and I woke up 30 minutes late.
So that brings me to now – sitting at my gate exploiting the DIA free internet. It’s nuts – the wait for PC just FLEW by. I expected as much since I’ve waited for longer things. But it’s finally here and I’m totally stoked. I ended up fitting everything in my 2 bags with complete ease. I underpacked so much that I brought every one of my cycling hats and my orange Goggins hat. I had so much room I just threw in whatever was in the closest proximity to me. So the second bag pretty much contains this:
Bike tools
Bike saddle
Bunch of shirts I threw in because I had the room
2 tubes of toothpaste
Sandals
3 knives
Screwdrivers
An orange
Shampoo
Jacket
Sleeping Pad
None of those were initially coming with me, but since I had this big empty bag that I was told I should bring, I figured I’d just fill it up.
Bring it on Peace Corps.
