Adios America

Well, this is it. I'll be off to Peru in a little more than 12 hours. I'll spend 6 weeks in the MTC (Missionary Training Center) in Lima, then I'll be off to Iquitos. Iquitos is a pretty interesting place; It's located on the Amazon river (literally in some areas of town), and is the largest isolated city in the world, meaning it can only be accessed via boat or plane.

Iquitos is the mission headquarters, but the whole mission covers pretty much all of the Amazon Rainforest in Peru, as well as some foothills of the Andes Mountains (the map shows the Iquitos mission boundries; ignore the stuff about Lima). Iquitos is really hot and humid (and I thought Mississippi was bad enough...), and is home to some of the biggest snakes and spiders in the world. Apparently the Spanish there is very different from Spanish everywhere else in the world, and is referred to as the Amazonian or Jungle Spanish dialect.