Just Like a Real Girl

I got to feel like a real American girl last night, if only for a little while. Rachel used Skype to call me on my cell from Portland, where they’re I think 10 or 11 hours behind us, and we chatted about her upcoming wedding and gossip and silly things for over an hour. And it was absolutely magnificent!

Oh, and Adam got to know which two teams were playing in the Superbowl. I think it made his week, though it did inaugurate the first time Rachel had ever typed the word “Superbowl”.

It’s so easy to cycle here -- and the cycling can make you obsessive and can also make you go a bit crazy (banana peel), so getting your head out of the cyclone is always such a breath of fresh air.

I used to whine in Uganda that, whenever we had new people over for dinner, it was just more of the same old thing - Conservation Conversations - I called them. We’d explain the project and the situation to the new visitor and how dire things were but it nearly never changed from the cycle.

And really, the genocide of a species is not Yum Yum Hungry kind of table conversation.

Here it’s a lot of the same, but we don’t have anyone new over for dinner, so it’s just Adam and Polycarpe and myself, discussing the same old chimp shit (ba dum *ch*)

But seriously, there are only so many times you can go over some of this stuff before it feels realer than you are.

We wondered as we lay in bed, contented and laughing about completely non-Congo-related things (for once) whether people know that they can call us at any time.

SkypeOut charges .31/minute to call our cellphone, which is a lot less than standard carriers, and we’re 7 hours ahead of EST.

+243992288216

So, call us and tell us your news! We promise to have the sounds of birdies and roosters crowing in the background, too!