I'm leaving tomorrow...

And the idea of fitting everything I need for two months into this bag is a little overwhelming:

(The fact that I still haven't really unpacked from family vacation at the beach last week doesn't exactly help...)  So naturally I'm doing this instead.  I do think that I finally have everything I need, though.  Tomorrow morning I head to Tennessee to meet all of my teammates, and then on the 7th we fly to Nicaragua! In honor of my excitement about starting this adventure, here are 5 things I know about Nicaragua [with a little help from Wikipedia], in case you wanted to know:

1. The east coast was an English colony and the west coast was a Spanish colony.  Because of that, the regions are very different and a lot of people on the east coast speak English and a lot of the place names are English. [learned that last semester in a class about "the new Latin American novel"...look at that college education paying off.]
2. The Panama Canal could have gone through Nicaragua [you can practically already get from coast to coast on the water, and apparently someone is still considering building a canal there].
3. It has the nicknames "La tierra de lagos y volcanes" (The Land of Lakes and Volcanoes) and "La tierra de poetas" (The Land of Poets).
4. The currency is called Córdobas and the exchange rate is about 22 Córdobas to 1 USD.
5. In 1990 Violeta Chamorro became the first female president of Nicaragua, as well as the first woman elected president in the Americas.

 This time tomorrow I'll be somewhere in the air between Richmond and Atlanta!

*Edit: It's only 5pm and I'm basically done packing! I think I fit everything in my bag AND it weighs less than 50 pounds. Success! Also, click on the link to the right of the page to read my team's group blog while we're gone (right now it hasn't been updated and just has old posts from the team that came home earlier this month).