vblog: meet felipe

Felipe.  Ah, yes, Felipe.  As you will see when you watch this video, Felipe appears to be a little on the quiet side.  In fact, he had most of us kinda fooled up until about the last week or so.  Then he got more animated (he gets really animated if you get him going, but of course I would never antagonize anyone) and zinged us with some killer one-liners. 

Felipe was on my project team so I worked and hung out with him a ton.  He was my neighbor in the hotel and every single day I could hear the hangers in his closet jangling repeatedly, which made me ponder every morning why this might be.  Maybe it takes a while to pick out a shirt?  He's a sweetheart... he brushes his teeth, calls his mom, calls his sister (for her birthday even!), holds doors, always lets his female teammembers go first, carries our packages.  I told him right at the beginning I was going to send his mom an email to let her know what a great job she did (Felipe's mom:  if you're reading this, great job!  Hope I do half as good with my son!). 

I've had some fascinating discussions with him about Colombia and all of South American politics, geography, people.  He has traveled widely - after our project here ends, he's going to Egypt for a week.  His perspective was invaluable to our project, since he had experience in our topic area.  He was the primary editor of my writing for the final report with excellent feedback, not something too many people give me, which just made me respect him more.  Felipe is awesome, that's all there is to it.  He can dance really well too, but that's a different post.  (Or an instant message?)

Oh, and one other thing.... Felipe claims I'm not remembering the SHAWL situation correctly, and that he didn't start it.  For the record, he so DID start it.  And continued it for 4 weeks.  (ha, Felipe, now try to say you didn't start it.  And it's a scarf.  I win!)

Hola, Mr. Colombia...