Preparation

... you go visit the doctor. I think i've been a little anxious about our trip and all the planning involved (no, really!?) and i've been having daily heart palpitations. I actually feel my heart miss its expected beat which then leads to me taking my pulse... where i feel my heart do something like this: beat, beat, beat, <pause>, beat, beat, beat, <pause>, beat, beat, beat, <pause>. It's kind of creepy... even if not completely abnormal.

So i went to the doctor's today for an ECHO test. It was uneventful and i won't hear anything about the results for a couple of weeks, but i did get to hear the sound of my heart... and you know what? It's pretty cool. You always hear stories about how amazing it is to hear the sound of your child's heartbeat in utero (for obvious reasons), but i thought it was fascinating to hear my own!

Next week i get set up with a holter monitor.

This will monitor the rate and rhythm of my heart for 48 hours. No showering. Lucky Jorge ^_^ I was supposed to be set up with it today, but the doctor ran out of them!?

Tomorrow we have an appointment to open up a bank account at Citibank - the only bank we know of that doesn't charge any service fees to withdraw money internationally. Friday we have an appointment at a travel clinic to get our vaccinations. Jorge's family is still here and next week....

Oh!? Was that my heart skipping a beat again?!

You would think with 3 months to go before leaving we would feel like we have all the time in the world... Not the case. We have so much to do in that time! What I really mean to say is that we have so much to buy! We bought our plane tickets during our 2-week summer holiday in June and that was what solidified our plans. It was no longer an "idea", but a full-fledged plan! It was also the first large sum of cash we parted with for this trip.

Flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina and back from Lima, Peru a year later x 2 = $3000
Travel insurance for a year x 2 = $800

As a combo birthday gift for Jorge and i, my parents purchased an Asus eee pc 900 for us. 20Gb, Linux, wi-fi, less than 1kg, small, and it's so damn cute!

Ours is black.

Jorge will be travelling with all his camera equipment (which makes me a little nervous) and we decided that i needed my own equipment. Since Jorge is looking at every picture through the eyes of a photographer, i'm in charge of pointing and shooting. That's why we purchased the Canon SD1100 IS for me. It's pink! Yes, i chose pink, but i was not impressed when the Future Shop employee assumed i wanted that colour. Especially since he didn't know that i wanted that colour so that the camera would look as much like a toy as possible. There is no such thing as boy and girl colours!!!!

Anyway, isn't it cute too?!

I've also bought memory cards and a case for my camera, and a year's worth of disposable contact lenses. We still need to buy one new backpack, travel towels, an external hard drive (for Jorge's pictures), renew my passport, etc...

Let's talk about money for a moment shall we? We are constantly asked how it is we can afford this trip. We are often asked what we do for a living immediately after saying we will be gone for a year and won't be working. We've been asked if we are independently wealthy (HAhahahahHAhahaha!!! Not until we win the lottery - which we will!). So here are some answers: We do not earn a lot of money (an admin. assistant who used to be a teacher and a bank teller - you figure out the math!?). What differs from some people is that we don't spend money on drinking, smoking, or clubbing. On the other hand, we don't stay home doing nothing. We go out to dance Tango a couple nights per week, we eat out a couple nights per week (nothing fancy), we go to the movies when we feel like it, we shop for clothes when we want... in other words, we live. Even when we used to take weekly Tango private lessons at $80 a pop, we were asked how we could afford that (which we don't understand by the way). However, everyone has their own set of priorities in life. We don't have children, we don't own a car, we walk to work, and we rent an apartment. These things alone allow us to save money in a completely different way from other people.

And no, we won't be spending even close to all our savings (wow, don't we sound rich... yeah right). We don't keep a budget and we don't pinch pennies, but we definitely know how to save.