Birthday and Playmobile toys part dos

Thanks to everyone that sent me awesome birthday wishes!! Coming off of a 12 hour bus ride to all of your e-mails and facebook posts was really a sweet surprise :) :)

So, the day itself wasn´t so eventful, but the first few hours and the last few hours were definitely nice :) We were originally just going to take it easy the night of Feb. 6th...just a bottle of house wine and a game of gin (whoever was winning by the time the wine was gone gets first choice of seats on the bus--even though it was going to be my birthday...what a sweet brother I have). But instead we found ourselves eavesdropping (sp?) on the table next to us at the hostel. So of course we started chatting with this group: a girl from the Netherlands (also named Laura), an Israeli named Amit (sp again?), and a really sweet Chilean guy named Pablo. They taught us a new card game (thank god, we definitely needed a new one), and upon learning that it was going to be my birthday in 15 minutes, decided to take us out to a club down the street. It was a good time (namely me making a fool of myself dancing again--but Pablo was insistent in helping me learn to Salsa...he was very sweet...I´m pretty sure some people at the bar were yelling at us) until we got locked out of the hostel and Matt pissed everyone off by snoring like a fog horn.

Then bus for 13 hours through what I like to think of as the Sahara desert with a 5 o´clock shadow of yellow grass. I think that is a sufficient description of the experience.

Then we arrived in Ushuaia and said goodbye to our friends from the night before (they were also getting up at 7:30 to catch the bus to Ushuaia) and headed to our SWEET hostel. Anyone coming here, definitely go to the Yakush hostel!! We finished off the day by trying the local BEAGLE beer (isn´t that the name of Magellan´s ship or something?).

Happy Birthday to me :) Paz. Afuera.

(also...the day before we spend in Punta Arenas Chile. It was this cute little town that reminded us more of a small Norwegian village or something. We have definitely left latin America. There was not to much to see in half a day except for a really cool cemetary with lots of slavic sounding names--interesting--and the walk back from a nature reserve) (Photo 1: outside of a cute school with a bunch of cartoons, photo 2: attempting salsa with Pablo; Photo 3: cool colors of the town; Photo 4 and 5: crazy cool cemetary; photo 6: cool fence coming back from the nature reserve--you can see the typical landscape behind; photo 6: cool colors to the town)