We're leaving already?

We're heading out for Argentina in the morning and I can't believe our sojourn in Montevideo is over. Everyone has been so kind to us here, curious about us and interested in our travels. We've said goodbye to the man at the cyber café - to us he will always be Señor Zoom. We took photos of the giggly bubbly chicas at the panaderia who all wished us good travels and told us to be careful.

We said goodbye to our friends at the planetarium and got to photograph Jupiter through the telescope eyepiece. Our lady at the lavanderia wrote us a goodbye note which she had a friend translate into English. Lavanderia became our "clean wash store." I want to post photos of all these people but haven't jumped through all the uploading hoops yet.

And we've said goodbye to our profesora and her husband, though we'll hand over the keys to her apartment tomorrow. She has been nothing but encouraging about our Spanish and wants us to take 10 minutes to email her questions whenever we hit a town with a cyber cafe. We may not be rock solid on the past subjunctive and conditional but we are miles ahead of where we started.

We expect to spend the first days in Argentina in a national park called El Palmar where we hope to see carpinchos (capybaras), among other things. For a leg of the journey up to Iguazu Falls we hope to sample a South American train ride. The falls are supposed to be spectacular, spanning the Argentine-Brazil border.

It feels as if we just got here and as if we've lived here a long time. We are lucky to have found such a lovely place and people on our first stop -- we feel like we'll always have a home in South America.