3 countries

/buenos aires/now!! and looving it! the city has a looot of green space still and is more spred out that sao paulo, which it litterally JUST skyscraper for miles and miles to the world´s edges, here it´s more like the old pittsburgh buildings just three to 6 stories and made out of really pretty old stone and designs.

/yesterday/arrived here from iguazu falls. (it was a 18-hr ride, and arentina`s highway is only two-lanes (one lanes for each direction) so they are expanding it now by two lanes, which they don´t pave the temporary side routes around where they`re working so we went through dirt roads a lot of the way... in the future i`m sure it`ll be a lot faster travel.

/long drive/... saw nothing but cows and flat land... THAT`s A LOT! i mean not even crops. or a single house. i think that´s about a lot of south american countries. some brazilians explained to me how you have to be rich to live in the country, but then if you`re rich you probably don`t want to/still need to be close to a city for business.

/left/for BA at 7:30 pm two days ago (it`s now 8:35 am) from Iguazu Falls, that same day we woke up at a hostel in Brazil but spent about the whole day in Paraguay... Paraguay´s Ciudad del Leste and Brazil´s Foz de Iguacu has really interesting dinamics!

/talked/to some braizlians and paraguayans, they say almost everyone who lives in foz de iguacu works in paraguay. and really, i`ve never crossed a river and had the world around me change soooooooo much!!! it was INCREDIBLE!

/guy/on the bus warned me- ´´why are you taking a bag? you`ll have to watch it really well! paraguay is a verrry poor country and everything over there is diiiirt cheap, so everyone goes over there to shop.´´

/asked/him why ´ppl don´t want to live over there on the paraguayan city, he said ´´you´ll see it`s really dirty and violent and a lot of people everywhere´´ (which is a HUUUGE contrast to foz de iguacu, when we were walking around there was never a single other person in viewing distance... except when we were at mcdonald`s) but when we crossed the border- PACKED with ppl and vendors and people walking back across the border carrying maaaany new enormous bags of newly purchased items.

/i/wanna live in paraguay, even though it`s i`m sure exponentially more violent, the government is almost nonexistent, and saw lots of guns... enormous guns on ppl lots of places... it was really really neat, exciting, and i even thought pretty.

/crossing/ the border to paraguay there and back - we just took a bus and successfully made it. :] which was exciting, cause we illegally entered w/o a visa. but they checked the bus and guess we didn`t appear english speaking, pretty much all english-speaking ppl need a visa there... oh yeah our bus broke down leaving paraguay.. so we were in paraguay a few more hours than we thoguht we`d be.

/getting/ into argentina took not too long. zack, laura, and me were approved quickly but celesse was denied. had to go talk to them... cause sao paulo entered her as a tourist and she`s here as a student. so that was quickly corrected.

/this/adventure has started off incredibly. already taken a plane. city bus. top-floor front-seats of a traveling bus. train. taxi. been to 3 countries: brazil. paraguay. argentina. 2 languages: portuguese. spanish. =touuugh transition. we are only 3 days into our 2-week trip!