Here, safe, and only a little bit confused

We're here! For now, we're in Santa Cruz, the big city where MCC has its Bolivian headquarters. We arrived yesterday morning after an exhausting flight, but very few troubles. We made it with all our luggage, my guitar and Andy's trumpet all in one piece, and having gotten at least some sleep on the overnight flight. Andy was delayed for a while in the immigration office. He paid his entrance fee too early, and the official didn't remember getting it and had to recount all the day's money to make sure he had enough money for the number of visas issued. It took a long time, but he finally made it through without having to pay another $135!

Our first impressions of Santa Cruz were that it's a very bustling (read hectic and confusing) place. There are no lines between lanes, but somehow all these thousands of cars manage to avoid bumping each other. The rule when merging or turning is "bumper first," meaning, if you can get your bumper in front of the guy next to you, you have the right-of-way. Supposedly this will make sense to us eventually.

We will only be here in Santa Cruz until tomorrow morning, when we'll be driven by other MCC workers up to Moro Moro, which is the small town (about 500 people) where we'll eventually settle for good. However, this time we'll only be there for about a month before returning here for language training. We are going there now to get some overlap time with the folks we are replacing, who will return to the states in early October. Apparently they have lots of interesting things planned for us, including a day of fishing in a river that's so muddy that you only have to hit the fish with sticks to catch them. Sounds like fun....I guess :).

We're not sure about our internet connection for the next month, but hopefully we can post pictures of our house and the town at some point after we arrive in Moro Moro.

We may have been overdoing the communication since we got here because we were so excited to have a reasonably fast wireless connection in the house where we're staying, but that might change soon!