Rewind Six Months

So I was sitting in my cubicle about six months, thinking to myself; I´m 25 years old, what am I doing sitting in a call center for Chase Bank trying to sell home equity loans? Now, unless you have been living in a bubble, six to eight (possibly a little earlier; it doesn´t matter, things were getting bad) months ago was about the time the housing really burst and the economy began to free fall. So now, not only was I doing something I really didn´t want to be doing but also the money I was making from 2007 was no longer going to be going in to my pocket, but instead it would be going into trying to save the bank from completely losing control of its retail finance sector. So I began to discuss with my friend Daniel Unger (who equally hated his job for different reasons) the possibility of just up and leaving Chase and begin to travel. Now ¨"travel" and "no" are two words that do not go together in Unger´s vocabulary so his response of course was ¨"sure, where are we going?" I´m not going to bore you with the details of our discussions but we both wanted to go to a Spanish speaking country and Europe was way too expensive (see above statement about our economy; that especially applies to the value of the dollar), and also a majority of the continent, well all of the continent except on country does not speak Spanish. It just so happened that I had recently found out I was going to have a brother-in-law and he just so happens to be from Chile and so Unger and I began to discuss South America. The more research we did the better idea we got of what we would be able to do. We got a smoking deal on a flight down and flights within the continent and decided one night "screw it, lets buy these tickets and go travel. If we don´t do it now we are going to look back one day and say, "what the hell was I thinking not to take advantage of that opportunity?"" So we looked at each other, clicked submit, yes that is how you book flights in this era, and our fates had been sealed. The six months between six months ago and present went by in a blur, so that is how I´m going to explain them. Gave Chase Bank my notice the day I got back from Puerto Rico (which happened to be an incentive gift from Chase Bank, but we won´t get into that, my mind had been made weeks earlier), packed up the house in Phoenix, Unger (the good friend he is) hopped in a Uhaul truck with my car in tow and the two dogs in the car (it was not inhumane, we left the windows open and stopped frequently), arrived in Monterey, worked for both of my parents for about a month, took an 8 week spanish class, continued working just for my father, went to the gym as much as possible (didn´t help, I´m still out of shape at 14000 feet), celebrated my sister´s wedding (it was a very nice event. Sorry Lisa; I´m not going into more details about it because this is my selfish blog all about me.), and before I knew it I was in a plane from SFO to Atlanta to meet Unger and take our flight down to Quito.

So now you know my story. I will update my blog as often as possible. Disregard grammar because I am basically writing what I´m thinking and I will never have time to make sure my writing abides by MLA (or whatever it is called) standards. I would love to hear from anybody who would like to post a comment, email me at brian.kroopf@gmail.com, or of course there is facebook. There are not a lot of Americans here so any news about anything American or just a hello would be much appreciated.