This is my last day in Peru. I'm leavin in a few hours, so I'm going to keep this short so I don't spend my last bit of time in an internet cafe.

I'm going to miss this country very much, though it'll be nice to be back in a country where I can understand the all street signs and the drinks don't attack me. The main thing I'm looking forward to is having something to do. At home, even when I'm lounging around, I have tools to build things, a bike, friends, etc., while here, although I'm sure it would change if I were staying more permanently, I often find myself with the uncomfortable feeling of uselessness or vacancy, as I realize I have to make up things for myself to do.

The Peru I got to know is a country where nothing fits together quite right and nothing happens on time, but it doesn't matter. Things always worked out, just not how I expected. The landscape here is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen, and when the altitude's not doing it, the view takes my breath away. There are peple here living much the same way they've living for thousands of years, and its sad to see the inevitable allure of tourism starting to change that.

Peru has a lot of things that America lacks. Americans seem very removed from eachother, absorbed with notions of privacy and personal space, whereas Peruanos accept the reality that they are living with other people. There aren't traffic laws here that I can tell, or liability lawsuits, or any of the legal sludge that America's sinking into. People can solve problems between themselves, without running to the courts for an adult. And you know something? In my month here, I never saw one dented car on the roads. I think there's a lot to be said for acting like adults and taking responsibility for your actions, something Americans as a whole don't quite know how to do.

That having been said, there's more poverty and (possibly) political corruption here in Peru. People have learned to watch out for themselves, since the government doesn't help them. The downside is that, if you fall through the cracks, there's no safety net.

By no means have I exhausted Peru's vast library of things to explore. I'm still fascinated by what the inside of a pig looks like, still don't know why none of the toilets in the country have seats, and I've only seen a fraction of the country, not to mention speaking less than 1/3 of the common languages.

My next trip? I have this idea kicking around of taking a kayak down to Iquitos in the Peruvian jungle, and paddling the Amazon into Brazil. By then, I'll probably be pretty good at Spanish, so I might as well work on Portuguese. Not any time soon--maybe when I graduate. When I have some serious time on my hands.

That's all you're going to get as far as a denoument is concerned. I generally don't write things for other people to read, so I almost didn't write this last entry, but I figured that I'd written about everything else, so it would seem incomplete if I didn't. In two hours I get on a plane back to the red, white, and blue.

There's this rhyme you find at the end of Spanish fairy tales. The direct translation is nonsense, but that's not the point. It goes something like this: