Goodbye my loooooooove

A very nice Canadian girl wandered into the hotel today and decided she wanted to stay and do volunteer work at the restaurant. Although it will be tough for just any gringo to match my waitering skills, I guess the hotel backpackers has a sufficient amount of volunteers now for me to leave. I still technically ´owe´the hotel three more days of work at the restaurant, and they said i might have to pay that back at some later point (maybe semana santa - easter - which is a huge holiday week for guatemalans).
Just like that, as I was just settling into my digs here at the hotel, I´m off again on another adventure. I leave tomorrow morning to start my duties to the orphans, still not really knowing what I´ll be doing. I will miss the regulars at the bar - Jean Marie, the Belgain who lives on his boat here on Rio Dulce and speaks a great mix of Spanish, French, German - Otto Ernesto, the Guatemalan caballero who totes his pistol everywhere he goes and loves to drink his gallo cerveza mixed with V8 juice (not bad, I shared one with him, but nothing like a Karl Strauss Amber). I will miss the employees of the hotel who I´ve become close friends with. Jonatan, the cashier at the restaurant who loves Snoop Dog and DJ Tiesto and who´s got an amazingly funny accent when he tries to speak English - Daniel, the 17 year old kid who graduated from the orphanage and who now works in the kitchen. One of my first days here I fished with him using string a hook and tortilla and we caught a pretty decent sized guapote, even though we were going for some mojarra.
It feels weird becoming friends with these people only to leave so quickly. It somehow doesn´t really feel right. I want to be more than just a passerby with them. They feel like more than that to me. One thing that the majority of people that I´ve met have in common, no matter what backgrounds they have here, is that they would all drop everything to have the chance to live and work in the United States. I´m not sure how I feel about that yet...
I finally figured out how to post some pictures on the blog. There is a link to a slideshow of my first couple weeks abroad on the right of the blog page. My camera does some weird things sometimes, so don´t blame my photography skills. If anyone has a decent camera they would like to send my way, I´ll make it worth your while.
As they say in Freedonia, Oogy Wawa!
Chris