Now, having put some time behind me - and with the day-to-day of being back squarely surrounding me...what did I really come away with? What could've been better? Worse? What could I have handled better? What did I really learn? Hm...I mean, I am a bad bytch, but other than that....
C.R.E.A.M. This I could definitely have handled better, but I know better next time. Traveling doesn't have to be super-expensive, but it does come with a price. Today's price...and it behooves one to find out what today's price is. Our student advisor suggested $XXX dollars would suffice for the entire trip, and I spent 3X that. Google is a tool, and I could've easily done my due diligence to find out how much money I really needed to take with me. The other thing is that I needed to have fund a-v-a-i-l-a-b-l-e, meaning if I didn't have cash: ATM, Credit Cards, a family member, good friend, supportive husband or financier would've sufficed. But I seem to have burned a lot of those bridges (for better, no doubt) in the last few months. I know better next time.
Speaken ze Portuguese? We were advised that fluency in foreign languages (or even a baseline of "how do I get to the bathroom?") isn't necessary for foreign travel. No, it's not necessary. But imagine being in the US, and trying, in broken Spanish, to ask the clerk making minimum wage at Mickey D's how to get to the bathroom - and their response. Psssht. Extend that to shopping malls, street vendors, policemen, cab drivers and the average person that bumps into you on the street. They were considerably more gracious in Argentina and Brazil than I imagine any US citizen would be. My advice: try to learn at least a little of the native language wherever you travel.
theREALRealWorld:: I could easily regale you with gossip...drunken nights, partying, drunken hookups, drunken clumsiness and injuries, folks getting pissed off and verbally berating each other - but then what would we learn? We've seen all this stuff often enough on TV, so there's no need** to recount the glory gossip details here. Suffice it to say that although the parties on reality shows always say "it's the editing", the producers can't edit in what didn't happen.





We leave Buenos Aires early Sunday afternoon, for a 2 hour flight to Rio. Again, there is much stamping of passports, immigration and customs checks, and much of me thinking I should really have smuggled something.
Aside: ok, yes - I'm new to international travel, but can I just say I was so ecstatic to get more stamps in my passport, I didn't know what to do. They blew out 4 pages between the trip to Uruguay, and going from Argentina to Brazil....*grins sheepishly*. I'll complain about having no pages MUCH MUCH later....

Plaza de Mayo:: This stop on our trip was an interesting kluge of contrasts. On the one hand, the
Simmons:: we visit the Simmons plant in the Gerli barrio of Buenos Aires (note: barrio actually translated to neighborhood). We tour the plant, and they also share quite a few of the impacts of the Argentine Financial crisis, and also discuss their relationship with the American companies: Sealy, it's american Simmons counterparts, etc. Then we get to watch the mattresses as their being built from start (literally from the wire used to make innerspring coils) to them being wrapped in plastic for distribution. We head from there, to YPF.
It's less than 24 hours away...and....
Ha! Did you think your girl had it all together for this trip? Yeah, so did I..until it was time to put the nails in the planning coffin...
