Well it's 2011, the latest in what is starting to seem like an arbitrary series of well marked chunks of time we continue to call years.  Maybe it was the park over the last month, or maybe the fact that I have been structuring my own life for the last half year, but time has seemed like a very odd thing lately.  Today I said goodbye to Kendra who I had only met a month ago at the beginning of our volunteer program, but years seem to have gone by since I was last in Puerto Natales, where I currently find myself trying to tune out Snatch while writing my blog post in this heaven of a hostel. Even more confusing is how the coming of this new year has affected the way I see time passing in my life on a grand scale.  Soon I will be 'prime' as Caitlin keeps reminding me.  I will be 23, and indivisible.  How strange.  Still I guess it's useful to mark time's passage regardless of how I relate to it overall.  Don't ask me why though.

On a less confusing note I will try to explain what has happened in my life over the past few weeks.  As Caitlin puts it again, we have only created and said goodbye to a "universe."  AMA and Torres Del Paine has been that universe, and a strange one indeed.  It was created through the normal and of course strange interaction of three, then four people and their various eccentricities.  Although this might not seem out of the ordinary, our particular universe, at least at its height involved things such as the eating of a lot of raw garlic. We climbed incredible mountainscapes while searching for that elusive door to reality, and when we found it within our tent christened "La Ultima Esperanza" (also the colonial name for Puerto Natales) toasted with garlic of course.  We woke up at 3:58 to watch the sunrise shine on glacier Grey, where we discovered that garlic eaten raw needs a chaser, whiskey works.  Finally, on the last day of the trek we started on New Year's day our 2 cloves of garlic a day caught up with us.  Or rather, we were found out in the van ride back by an Australian with a mediocre sense of smell. . .   But this makes us seem like garlic addicts and nothing more!  We also ate at least 1.5 bars of chocolate a day, taught Kendra to love Nutella, all the while bonding over terrible foot fungus.  In short, I have lived in an alternate universe of absolute diversion and fun.  

On the 5th of January we left the park for good.  The goodbyes were actually sad, which I guess is the mark of a good experience.  The Erratic Rock hostel, owned by wonderfully odd Oregonians offered to put us up for free, so here we remain 2 days later.  It is now time to recalibrate our world yet again for traveling--entering what Caitlin calls (yet again) our transition through liminality. . .   We will be moving northward on the eastern coast of Argentina, gunning for Buenos Aires by the 19th.  Wish me luck!