2nd to last weekend

Really gettin busy here...

Friday: Wen to go see The Hunger Games with Liz, she didnt tell she she had already seen it til we had bought the tickets, so she was just humoring me. It was a pretty darn good movie; fun to watch right after finishing the books. Afterwards we went to Hard Rock Cafe and had one of the best burgers of our lives. It was so big we had to split it and we were still tremendously full.

Saturday: Chill, work out, hw, hw, watched a movie for humanities, napped

Sunday: Went on a bike ride through Palermo Lakes and the Rosedal. Went to Tigre and bought tickets for the game later that night (ashton almost got us killed by wearing his Boca jersey there). Got back to the casa and did hw/rest for 4ish hours then headed out with our whole group (8(me, daniel, peter, ashton, kevin b, austin, jake, shan) plus tess who didnt have a ticket). Somehow we snuck tess past the 3 security checkpoints and got her in free. We found a spot at the far right end of the populares section behind the goal. It was a blast being in the cheap seats because thats were all the crazy fans were. We spent a good period of the game over in the center of the populares with the crazy guys. Each time they scored, you'd think they were cheering for the second coming of Jesus or something. It was nuts! Definitely got elbowed in the face a few times. Tigre scored 2 goals off of free kicks and Boca got one off of a messy corner kick. It was so much fun being in the Tigre section when that final whistle blew.

Monday: La Bomba de Tiempo. They had a super sick guest drummer there. 

Iguazu Falls

So this trip was perhaps on of the more memorable trips- not necessarily best, but memorable of this year. After 7 months of being abroad and traveling, we knew that renting cars was the way to go. So, we got a solid crew of 5 people to go in our usual car- the Volkswagen Voyage from Localiza. Come Saturday morning (oh yeah I forgot to write about our Midnight Yoga thing that we did on Friday night. Five girls (Liz, Shannon, Megs, Julie, and Tess) and I went to this combination of a yoga session with a puerto cerrado dinner- pretty dang good) we got the car, got loaded up, and found the other crew of kids that were going to Iguazu via coche were moping around all sad. One of their partners was screwing them over by saying he was "sick" THE MORNING OF, and said that he couldn't go. This made it un-doable for some of the others because it would be too expensive. A couple of them still wanted to go though, so we accommodated them and put 7 people in our 5 person car- 2 up front, 4 in the back and 1 in the truck. I spent a lot of time in the trunk because I was the smallest. Personally, I thought it was the most comfortable seat in the car- i could lie down on sleeping bags, pillows, and sweaters and nap. It was great.

While in the trunk, I guess we missed one of our roads (which proved to be a blessing later) and ended up in Rosario. We tinked around there a bit, got some choripan in the park, saw a pretty sick monument, and then headed off again. We didn't encounter any problems or questions from police until we were literally 50 yards from our hostel at 7am. It was a usual checkpoint, they randomly choose our car to check, and as usual asked us to pop the trunk. Aisha popped out to their surprise, they laughed a bit, questioned us, and then sent us off with a "Suerte!" We couldn't believe it. Anyways we rolled into our hostel for breakfast, showered, rested a bit, and then went to the falls. The falls themselves were absolutely amazing, but the park kinda sucked, it felt like an amusement park with way too many people. It's sad to see something so amazing so commercialized. But like i said, the falls were absolutely astounding. Never before have I seen such a force of nature so close and personal. Words could never do it justice. We saw the Devil's throat and did the Lower Circuit trail. Some of the guys did the boat ride that went into the falls while the rest of us went to go take a nap in the grass. En route to our napping point, we passed the Sheraton and decided to crash their pool and take naps on their pool deck. It was glorious.

That night we went into town to get a snack, dropped Arthur off at the bus station, went back to rest, read, and write, and then we had a great pasta dinner. To finish the night, we took a dip in our hostel's huge pool. That hostel is probably the nicest I've ever been in- huge main building, bomb endless breakfast, huuuge pool, TV lounge, kitchen, foosball, ping pong, all sorts of chairs and loungers out by the pool, our own room, and more.

The next day we rolled out semi-early, and decided to go to the Amethyst mines. The "tour" at the amethyst mines was pretty hilarious. It was essentially a walk through someone's back yard with a very uninformed kid as a guide. It was very neat to see nonetheless. The way back home was not nearly as easy as our trip up. Our lil detour to Rosario forced us to take a more inland route, farther away from the borders with Paraguay and Brazil. That road hardly had any checkpoints. This was not the case with our more direct route. We got stopped multiple times and each time they asked us to pop the trunk. Once they let us go after much hassel. The next time we told them we were spending the night in a city only about an hour south so they had us put 2 people on a bus there and we met them at that stop, only to continue on with 7 people in the car. The next time the same thing happened, but we were close enough to put them on a bus directly to BA. Funny thing was after that, we never got pulled over again, so they could have made it with us. Anyways, we made friends with some of the cops (one even added us all on FB). We got an official, documented "warning" and have the paper to prove it, but we all think of it as more of an award.

Eventually we all got home safe and sound and all was good. In addition to seeing one of the Natural Seven Wonders of the World, we got some great stories and memories out of it.

waiting at the police checkpoint

Rosario monument

Random Happenings

So I realize that as this year goes on, I'm getting so much worse at keeping this up. I still have many Christmas break travels I have yet to talk about, long weekends to catch up on, and random happenings throughout the weeks that I haven't mentioned. I'll just mention a come of the more significant happenings that have occurred in the past couple weeks.

So we arrived back from our Norte trip (which I have not talked about yet) on Monday around noon still all grodey, stinky, and cramped from our 15-hour sprint back home. I missed my classes that day but Rafa said they were excused (because our trip was just that legit and he was jealous/proud of us). That night he invited some of us guys to a special event at some super nice museum off of Libertador. It was an event for the Nature Conservatory Project (something like that) and Rafa is trying to get us (Pepperdine) partnered up with them in some way, shape, or form. Not quite sure what he's trying to swing...Anyways we were the greeters who handed out name tags and directed people to where they needed to go. Wasn't a bad gig at all- we were constantly being fed appetizers and drinks by the waiters that were walking around and mingling among the crowd. We felt like high rollers. After a while they all went inside for some kind of presentation and we kicked it and chilled at the entrance enjoying our free exquisite food and drinks. After the presentation Rafa brought us in to mingle with everybody. Little did we know that we'd be talking with former presidential candidates, billionaires, and all other upper-echelon people. Very cool night.

The crew that went to the Norte had the idea of buying Karu (Sassot's jungle friend) a present. Sassot had said he loved books so we figured we'd get him some kind of jungle/animal/amazon book. Liz and I went to the Ateneo (formerly Grand Splendid Yenny) but struck out there. We figured we'd just order the book we figured would be perfect instead (The Jungle Book) of settling for something sub-par. Afterwards we went to Jajau and found our favorite ice cream of the year- essentially peanut butter with reeses.

Last night us dudes set out to go find a bomb burrito place. I didn't suggest it, so I didn't look into it because i figured they would. They didn't. We remembered someone telling us where it might have been, trusted that, and found out that we couldn't have been any further away. So we went to La Pena del Colorado and had some bomb empanadas. Afterwards 6 of us dudes went out to Grido.

This morning I had breakfast with my homestay brother at Oui Oui and had an amazing waffle with fruit, nutella, and honey.