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Happy Halfway Day, everybody. As in halfway thru the year. In my childhood, it was proposed as a pseudo-holiday in which you do a lot of things halfway, but I do that quite enough the rest of the year.

On the subject of earlier times, ever since I heard an estimate that we have a completely different set of cells every seven years, I've had a habit of thinking of how and where I was seven years ago. Right now, that puts me on my exchange trip to Panama in the summer before my 12th-grade school year.

I think it was Chirpasee who suggested that I post about it someday. Here goes.

The exchange program was AFS, one of those organizations that annoy me simply by never spelling out their acronym anymore. The trip was 35 days long and split among time with two host families in different parts of Panama and time with the other students and our supervisors. There were many girls – I never learned all their names – but only four guys other than me, not counting Belgian supervisor Hugo (later nicknamed Juice, because a mispronunciation of his name equals the Spanish word for juice, jugo).


( The annoying part )

( The labor part )

( The nature part )

More to come.