Free overnight stay at a Marriot and a free beer in the same day?

first off ill tell you right now, the Argentine Dialogue will prolly not get finished, going back through those last days which were pretty shitty, just makes me all the more bitter and resentful over my time at northeastern. maybe somewhere down the line, ill go through it for yall, but dont hold your breath.

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well, made a United Airlines flight from Milwaukee to Newark, but apparently there was a system wide computer issue, like system wide, not just the Milwaukee Airport but like, everywhere. and given todays digital age, of course nothing worked, the ticket agents barely knew how to operate without the computers so it took extra long for us to get our not real tickets.

these not real tickets were in fact hand written tickets, that were scrutinized by the wonderfully competent Milwaukee TSA agents. our plane showed up a lil late, and landed us a lil late, not to fear i thought, as we had over an hour to get to our next plane.

well we landed just fine, with 40 min to spare. however, because of the backup the overhead announcement assured us our connecting flights would be late too. and the gates were a lil behind. so we sat on the tarmac, and watched the minutes tick by, and at 935 we watched our direct Newark to Dublin flight leave with out us.

upon finally getting to the gate at 945 we hurried over to the gate next to use, which was apparently the only other direct flight to Dublin until the 1st of sept.

couldnt make it on that flight.

so united fucked us. and to follow that up, they gave us a food voucher for the airport

and we got a wonderful free night in a hotel in Newark, new Jersey.

now i dunno if you have ever been to Newark, or at least flown through. but it sucks, basically flying through is all youd ever want to do, there is nothing there, its an industrial/port town. we got on a hotel shuttle which had to get on 3 freeways for a total of maybe 1 mile of travel to get us to the hotel. we were literally staying on a free way island, without a car, there was nothing for us to do.

if we had been stuck in Boston, or DC or New York it woulda been bearable, id know what to do before our 430 flight the next day.

that 430 flight by the way, wasnt taking us to Dublin, cause i guess they only fly direct to Dublin twice on Tuesday night, and once on Saturday night in any given week. so we went to Dusseldorf, had another layover and then got to Dublin 1130am on Thursday, a full 29 hours late. awesome.

once in Dublin we began to navigate the bus system getting to our "guesthouse" easily. there we proceeded to find some food in the neighborhood, take a nap, and decide to hit up the Guinness "Storehouse" tour.

now this wasnt a brewery tour, dont get excited, it was basically a lil museum set up by Guinness to walk you through the process but never actually see it happen. being that i have been on a few of said tours in my day, i was a little disappointed.

anyways the place was crammed with Notre Dame and Navy people, which honestly further detracted from the experience but whatever. by the end of it we got a free (lol after paying the entrance fee of course) pint at the top of the place.

after the tour we went home and went to sleep, at like 630pm

profoundly upsetting

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enjoyed the closest thing we have gotten on our "vacation" in El Calafate. our professor had scheduled some radio interviews with local Patagonian stations. now much like all of the rest of our trip, we had no idea why were were here.

this wasnt like the radio station we visited in Serbia, discussing the conversion to free speech, and their involvement in the overthrow of Milosovic.

this wasnt like our tour of the Radio Free Europe (or whatever it is called nowadays).

this wasnt to talk about how we are dialoguing with different civilization, about being American college students in a foreign country.

this was an opportunity for claudia to plug the dog shelter that we had volunteered for.

we crammed into 2 different radio studios so she could give her talk, and briefly talk about why we were there, however both stations thought we were specifically down in Patagonia to help the dogs.

little did we know the dog situation

we were released for lunch, and returned to the front of the hotel for the bus ride to the dog shelter.

first we were taken to an empty lot, that had a big square wall in it, with empty space within, and we were told that this was going to be the new shelter, it was clearly unfinished, but its winter, the ground is frozen, i know how that works. ok, cool, time for the old shelter.

now, claudia had told us to "bring clothes you dont mind maybe getting dirty/throwing away"

i certainly own clothes that i am willing to part with, i even have shoes i would be happy to toss, but i can tell you i would never pack unnecessary shit for a 5 week trip, nor will i pack that kinda shit on a sub-trip where all i have is a backpack.

so, to Argentina i brought with me like 8 t-shirts, 2 button-downs, 4 pairs of jeans, a pair of khakis, 18 pairs of socks + 1 black pair, a dozen pairs of underwear of various types, and the shoes on my feet.

on our "long weekend" in Patagonia, i brought 4 shirts, 2 pairs of jeans, 5 pairs of socks, 5 pairs of underwear, and the shoes on my feet.

ok so you see my wardrobe is limited, i cant willy-nilly decide to toss my shoes and pants.

i figured she was exaggerating about the need for disposable clothes, this is the lady that calls for us to meet at the airport 6 hours early, the lady who suggested our parents come with us to the airport to be introduced to her before we leave, who wears more layers of clothes than a viking raider on the Danish coast.

she was completely and utterly understating the nature of this "dog shelter"

the buses took us into the municipal sanitation headquarters (read: the dump) and as we came on what appeared to me to be a shanty town, we saw the roving dogs outside the fence.

when we pulled up and got out we were assailed by the smell of 80 some unwashed, unloved dogs.

upon beholding the sight before us, 2 of our number got back onto the bus, i regret with every fiber of my being not getting back on that bus.

(i say there are a few times in my life where i have truly, genuinely not wanted to do something, namely my trip to El Salvador, this was very much like that)

i am not a dog person (cats fit my personality much much better {read: apathetic}), but neither am i particularly frightened of dogs. on this occasion i was unsettled by the number, proximity and health of the dogs around me.

i was tasked with a few other kids to clean up some of the shit in one of the pens.

let me describe this for you as best as i can.

this is a shanty town, the fences are made up of part barbed wire fence, part mattress springs, and part shipping palettes. the meager shelter the dogs had within this pens was made of up everything from 55 gallon drums, to more palettes, to political slogan signs. the floor, at least in our section, was not a floor, but a layer of frozen mud/shit.

you know how when your dog (or baby) is sick, and it shits real nasty? imagine that, but it never gets better, it just keeps shitting in the same 15ftx15ft area, and that instead of one sick entity, its 15.

also it had rained, so even the most solid of poops was rendered into a slurry mess of what was most likely disease ridden offal.

we were given a bucket to put garbage bags in (and fill with shit), a shovel, a garden rake, and a broom.

with these tools we were to clean the pens.

there was not a single square inch of the pen that was not some form of dog shit, best case scenario you were standing in 50/50 mix of foetid mud and identifiable dog shit.

we did the best we could, and i walked away. i couldnt do it, these dogs would have been better off living freely in the semi-wild of Santa Cruz province, and dying to larger predators or cars than living in the squalor they were.

i tossed my gloves and wandered into the dump.

i was more comfortable walking into a dump, than dealing with four score mangy (and i literally mean mangy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mange) fucking dogs.

that is a view across the dump to the mountains.

i was humbled by this entire day, i will admit. this dogs had an awful life, and as claudia (the prof) said, we are responsible for our pets, and somewhere that chain of responsibility was tragically broken. everyone of those dogs deserved more than a hovel, a 40 square foot pen floored by frozen dogshit, and dessicated cowbrains to eat. but i personally am not the person to rectify their situation.

furthermore, 25 american kids, who at this point are effectively on vacation, are not the appropriate volunteers to better these dogs lives either.

much like the time before this (and as i write this retrospectively after this) we had no idea what the fuck we were getting into. our professor did no accurately describe what was going on. considering this was one of the very very few things we knew about before coming down here, it seemed to be if not mandatory strongly encouraged.

i am deeply upset that we were, as a group of Northeastern students on a dialogue for language learning, brought to this hellhole and encouraged to help these animals.

however i am even more upset that it has contributed to the awful taste in my mouth Northeastern is leaving me with.

i write this now, quite literally on the verge of the verge (yeah the verge of the verge) of tears because i am so disappointed in how accurately this trip has summed up my entire college experience.

A. i (or my parents rather) paid way too much for me to learn relatively little

B. i was lured by promises, and surprised by shit-circumstances (literally and figuratively)

we were taken home on the bus, i went for an aimless walk around the tiny town of El Calafate, returned, and (i know i usually craftily word this) drank an entire liter of beer in the shower, and finished my journey towards getting hammered with shitty vodka and shittier orange juice.

alcohol is a terrible coping mechanism, i know, alcoholism and drug induced escapism is bad. but after the dogs, i really needed a drink.

dinner was fantastic, and the company i kept were equally upset by the day, so we managed to not talk about it.

the party started up again in my room, i hung out for a while, and went off with those same girls i had wandered the glacier park with the day before. had a good time talking to them, and managed to rid myself of the initial shock of what i had been "encouraged" to participate in.

if Hoth and the Endor moon had a baby

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a slightly less early morning, started with basically the same breakfast, scrambled (potentially) faux eggs, toast various pastries, and then we piled onto the tour bus to go to the Glacier National Park proper, using their gate and everything, reading all the signs to maintain the contamination (spanish doesnt have a word for pollution so they say contamination) free nature of the nature.

unfortunately it was very foggy, so the busride was a little lacking in fantastic vistas, and the subsequent boat ride to a different face of the Perito Moreno Glacier was also made a whole lot less interesting. here are a bunch of pictures of that stuff anyways.

the fog was actually pretty cool, it cut visibility down to like 50m. this boat got real close to the edge of the Perito Moreno glacier, if you compare the pic there of the glaciar face, you can see it is very similar to one of em from yesterday.

after the boat ride we were dumped back on shore, saw a fox, and rode up a mountain overlooking the glacier and walked around a bunch of raised pathways, and took a shitton of pictures as the fog cleared

i walked around with a group of girls that i previously had little conversation with. as i had suspected the homestay situations caused the cliques to develop based on location, and ultimately they were rather heterogeneous and nonporous.

here are more pictures

also, here is one of those oh so rare pictures of me

the walk was fantastic, seeing the glacier from above like that, hearing it moan and creak and crash as it warmed up unevenly and broke and shifted, in one of those pics you can see a huge recent break, unfortunately we were the other side of a hill and only heard it. that is clearly multiple dozens of tons of snow, even being probably 1km away, and around a rather large hill we heard this crack and fall off, and it was on par with the loudness of standing atop a subway grate with the train running beneath you.

this trip ate up almost all of the day, we returned, napped, at dinner, and partied again in our hotel room. the cards against humanity game ( http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/ ) i had printed up in Buenos Aires was a hit, and i handed them off to a freshmeat girl who im sure will have at least one fun game out of it back home with her roomates before they destroy the cards.

luckily with all our hotel shenanigans, nothing bad happened, no broken furniture or fixtures, no one getting in trouble and no over-imbibing to the point of potential injury

hey look, more ice

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early morning, ate the heaviest breakfast ive had in country, (continental buffet) scrambled eggs, toast, a very thin watery drinkable yogurt and various pastries. we hopped a bus to the glacial lake Lago Argentino. the catamaran we were on was big and heated, and took us to the three major glaciers down here, the Perito Moreno ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perito_Moreno_Glacier ), Upsala ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upsala_Glacier ) and the Spegazzini.

here is a pic dump of that 8 hour boat ride

the glaciers down here arent all that old on the geologic timescale, but they are pretty big, all of them are fingers of the Patagonian icefields, creeping through the mountains wearing them down, so in a few dozen millenia there area will look alot like the Great Lakes Region in the States. The biggest one, the Perito Moreno glacier is like 250 sq km, which is pretty damn big, making it alone one of the largest reserves of freshwater on earth.

this took pretty much all day, we got back exhausted, napped, ate a fantastic dinner at the hotel, and then partied in my room again, plenty catz, cards, laughing yelling, handstands good times overall.

the ends of the earth

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got to sleep in a bit, and head to the Buenos Aires domestic airport Jorge Newberry ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroparque_Jorge_Newbery ), being that it is a relatively small airport, and there arent all that many catz flyin around midday monday we got through security quickly, i didnt even have to ditch my shoes or pull out my computer. also i made a concerted effort to finish the vanilla vodka-espresso liqueur-dulce de leche liqueur in the morning, so i had a very pleasant airport experience. being that Claudia is chronically afraid we are going to be late to something, we showed up to the airport 3.5 hours early, with ticketing and security talking all of 30 minutes, we had plenty of time to kill in the airport. most of the hours were whittled away by blank staring out the window and stealing other peoples jackets for sleeping.

the plane ride was uneventful, we got a sandwich, which most people didnt like, so i had like, 4. the descent was beautiful, the little bit of it i could see, i was on an aisle seat, with two of the girls between me and the window.

it was kinda like Iceland, in that it was all craggy and scrubby, but there was alot more, and alot larger mountains, and subsequent snow.

its winter down here now, so there is snow on the ground, and the mountains are particularly white. it was indeed chillier here, but in all honesty, it wasnt as jarring as the temperature in Buenos Aires, i guess cause it seems more like winter down here?

a bus took us to our hotel and we got all signed in, rooms distributed, me and evan one of the OTHER undergrad graduees got the double, however, it was a doubgle with a king, everyone else had triples with three twin beds, me and evan got to share a bed, i mean its whatever, the bed was so big that when he started talking in his sleep i couldnt flail and hit him without actually moving in the bed.

this is the view outside my window

our group of twenty-odd kids descended upon the little gorcery store to pick up sandwich and snack materials for the lunches we would need during our various outings, and drink for the nights spent in the hotel.

our room wound up being the hangout room, meaning each night we had like 20 kids in there, luckily our bed could easily fit like 12, and there floorspace in the corner could comfortably hold another 10 (meaning even when EVERYONE was in there, there was ample space). there wasnt too much late hangouts on the first night, as lots of people were wiped from the flight, and we had an early morning for a boat ride the next day.

Graduation day!

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soo we are done with class, so no more boring posts about class. we had about an hour of hanging out in class, talking to Jonatan (who i have since friended on Facebook) then we had to give our presenation on the conflict, which went awesome by the way. the presentation immediately before us was about wine, so we all got samples, and luckily there were a few left over at the end, so me and mike had a few extra styrofoam cups of wine to calm the nerves before/during the presentation. we rocked it, i did my normal make it up as i go talky-talk bit, Claudia seemed satisfied that i wasnt reading off the slides (though it was ok for mike to do so) and still manage to be articulate with my spanish. again this whole class situation reminds me very much of middleschool, it is about the same level of spanish on my part, and then the presentation and lectures were about the same as that (similar topics as well)

after this was the fantastic graduation ceremony, we were handed our "diplomas" and grades, i did ok? im still not sure how that rubric worked, but i got like a B maybe? then we got to eat food, various types of empenadas (including a cheese and fig empenada that was not very good), luncheon meats, including liverwurst, or whatever it is called here, i spread that on some buns, and ate prolly half of the liverwurst while elliot (the other undergrad-graduee) ate the other half.

we headed to a bar to watch more Olympics, much of the group went to a pirate bar accross the street from the irish bar our friends got their shit stolen from. i and a few others however, went to the irish bar, which was cool, cause it was pretty much the 5 of us, and the bar owner who let us watch whichever channel we wanted of the Olympics. we ent up watching field hockey, and basketball highlights.

mike and i made it home for dinner and chatted with our homestay guy and his girlfriend, and went out to a bar we had tried to get into earlier on the trip but had a group that was too large. 6 of us made our way over there, and went upstairs to sit down, running into a group of 3 girls from our trip in the process. they were dirnking delicious raspberry mojitos, and having a grand ole time, i managed to steal a bunch of peanuts from them, as the waiter was taking forever to get to us. we had a beers and good laughs and an absurd amount of shelled peanuts.

we went home relatively early to prepare for our trek to Patagonia

miles to go before i sleep

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another lazy day, alot of people went to a club after congo, i did not (surprise surprise) but by all accounts everyone had a great time. we woke up pretty late,
we got a phone call suggesting we meet up with a few people at a bar in Palermo to watch the Olympics and eat very good food. i opted to go on a wander around the city. i had no real direction, i just meandered about with my ipod watching the people, and the traffic, and store fronts and whatnot, until the late afternoon, when i happened upon a busstop to a line i recognized would get me to the plaza in Palermo that would get me close to the bar catz were at. unfortunately i rolled into the bar at the precise moment the kids there were wrapping up their bill, so we chatted for a few moments before we broke, and i managed to get myself and mike lost looking for a bus. ultimately my getting lost got us to a BETTER bus that dumped us of closer to home.

we went to bed early, as monday we had to celebrate our graduation from the Bridge classes, as well as present our presentation on the Melvinas War/Falklands Crises