Adieu...Adieu...to you and you and you!

Well, April has come and gone and our Peace Corps service has come to an end. The last two years have been so crazy--we had so many wonderful experiences we hope will be etched in our minds for a long time to come, but will probably be forgotten sometime early next week and we have had some so not great times that we probably will never forget, no matter how hard we try. Such is life.

One of the wonderful experiences we had was our going away party. We were going to try to slip away quietly into the night but when our neighbors found out our intentions to slither away unnoticed, they quickly pulled together and helped us to throw a moderately huge party. We killed a pig, made approximately 24,382,385,103 pounds of food (just a rough estimate) and rented a videoke machine. In a word, it was 'ausgezeichnet.' Somehow, since we arrived at our site, we managed to acquire nearly 15 times the amount of things we initially arrived with, so we decided to have a Farver-farewell-free-for-all Raffle at our party, and everyone loved it. All of the people who attended the party (teachers, co-workers, neighbors, local village officials and most importantly, random tricycle drivers) put their name into a box. We assembled all of the prizes (or in other words, things not important enough to stuff into our overloaded bags but not worthless enough to throw away) and it was quite an array--shoes, shirts, sandals, movies, books, pens, stickers, shoes, sandals, shirts, flashlights and shoes were laid out for everyone to ogle over (yes, Erin got a lot of shoes since being here...). All the party-goers were clamoring over and claiming the coveted goods in hopes of their names being chosen first. I personally thought the shoes were kind of silly to offer as gifts to our guests, but they were the first things to go. The Farver-farewell-free-for-all Raffle was a huge success and everyone went home with bulging bellies sore throats and tired legs (we sang and danced A LOT). It was nice to have a bit of closing to our time there and it was great to see how many people loved us enough to come to our party (who am I kidding, people love roasted pig--I'm pretty sure there were some who came in, grabbed a plate and asked who the funny looking white people were).
A few days later we left our site for good. Our neighbors brought us and all our junk (luggage) to the bus terminal. We had a convoy of 1 van, 2 tricycles and a handful of bikes to see us off and it was quite the tearful goodbye. Except that when we arrived at the terminal, all 18 of us, the bus had not yet arrived so we stood around and waited, not quite ready to be sad, but not much to talk about at 8am in the blazing tropical sun. Only when the bus came did the tears flow, and so we hugged and kissed and waved and hopped on the bus and left our province of Antique.
Except we did not leave the Philippines yet. We still had medical clearance, close of service meetings, pre-English language camp training and an English language camp to attend to, so while it was sad to leave Antique, it really was not goodbye in the least. We still had a month of living out of our bags before we left the Philippines for a month of living out of our bags in other countries. Yay! There's not much sweeter than the smell of forgotten dirty clothes crammed into a backpack full of fresh, clean clothes. Mmmm.
In one sentence, here is what we did between leaving Antique and leaving the country.

We left for Iloilo then took a flight direct to Manila for Erin to help with training for the new batch of volunteers then flew with our friend Alice to swim with the whale sharks in the Bicol region, had a birthday (Scott), flew back for Close of Serice (COS) conference with all of our batch-mates, had our medical checkups, planned a 2 week English Conference for teachers from the Mindanao region, got walking Pneumonia (Erin),facilitated said camp, had a birthday (Erin), partially recovered from walking Pneumonia (Erin), returned to Manila, said goodbye to our volunteer friends, boarded a cab then a bus then a plane and flew out of the Philippines, destination, Malaysia.
Phew
Erin says the whaleshark trip deserves an extra sentence because it was so awesome.
Here goes:
Swimming with the whalesharks was possibly the coolest thing we have done in the Philippines.
There.
Actually, each event could warrant its own blog entry, and were I not so forgetful and tired in April, you would have already read all about them. Being as I have an incredibly short attention span, I can not imagine other people wanting to read mundane details that happened a jillion miles away last month, so we'll just tell all 3 of you who actually read this all about our April adventures when you pick us up from the airport (Mom, Mom and Dad).

Right now we are in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (the cool people call it KL, so, of course, being as I never sat at the cool table, I will continue to call it Kuala Lumpur). We leave tomorrow for Cambodia to explore the Angkor Wat Temples. We return to the good ole' U S of A on May 27 and are looking forward to seeing everyone we love and then stuffing our faces with ice cream, cheese and steak, preferably all at the same time.
Thank you for your support during our Peace Corps service!
Love,
Scott and Erin