Real Estate by Baryshnikov...and other news.

So much has happened in the past few months it's tough to know where to begin. I feel that 9:00pm this past Thursday night is as good a place as any. Right about then, Taylor and I arrived at El Rio, a nearby café, to meet two guys from an apartment agency to try to find places for the summer project group to stay. Shortly before sitting down, they called and told Taylor they were running late but that we should order and they would pay for our drinks. We ordered fruit tea and talked...for 40 minutes. We were starting to worry, but then saw two guys in their early 30's approach our table. We introduced ourselves and shook hands - I knew they didn't actually catch my name and I forgot theirs about 4 seconds after hearing them. One of them had dark hair, dark eyes, and very limited English so he spent most of the time quietly listening and staring. The other did most of the talking and looked strikingly like a young Mikhail Baryshnikov (i.e. not bad). Since our tea was gone and paid for they insisted on us ordering something else. After that, it only took about 5 minutes to reconfirm the details of what types of apartments we needed and at what price. The half hour of small talk and long pauses that followed was...awkward. But we're used to that by now, so it wasn't all that bad. Walking home we were laughing at ourselves and recalling various parts of the evening that entertained us when we noticed they were following about half a block behind us on the way to their car. Oops, hope we weren't too loud...

Considering that I haven't posted anything in over 3 weeks, and even that was about our travels in January, I've fallen pretty far behind. We'll see how it goes from here on out, though I can't make any promises. Now we're two men down - Andy's in Portland to stay, and John is in Sarajevo indefinitely. We hoped he would be back in a couple weeks, but now it's been 3 and the last update we got on Friday was that no progress had been made on his case. So. There you have it.

We're busy, we miss John, the semester is well underway, and we went to Ireland!