Querido Xanga,
"I wouldn´t touch those prostitutes with 7 condoms" -Kirk / "Well it´s a good thing I have 8!..." -Lil´ Jason
wow. what a week it has been. sorry it has been so long since I last updated but i have been extremely busy either with enjoying south america or else doing work for AMUN and that combined with limited internet access. i apologize. but here is an extremely long post to go over all that has happened:
well im here in BA. maggie and jess are here although now that i am in my own hotel and they are scattered all over the city its hard to hang out. we are supposed to do dinner tonight to hang out with jess´s family and also hopefully jeremy and lisa. should be fun. went around the city today just walking. my hotel is a block away from 9 de Julio so i first went walking to find food and then to try and cash my traveler´s cheques. unfortunately all the banks seem to be closed so i´ll have to try later this week. went to Retiro Station and booked my bus for Mendoza along with my hostel here as well. Its going to be a really short trip but I hope it´ll be fun. I´m praying i´ll get to do both the things i want to do there: have a good view of Aconcagua and visit the state park AND do a few wine tours.
Yesterday, my body was exhausted because Jess and I pulled another Buquebus and stayed up all night long after the final party in Brasilia since we had to leave the hotel by 3:30am to get to the airport by 4isham since our flight was at 6am in the morning. It was a long tired journey since we had to fly first to Sao Paulo where we changed airports and then fly to Buenos Aires. Met up with Maggie and since I could not find a place to stay I ended up staying in the same hostel as Maggie last night in Palermo. Tried to hang out with Jess but she was busy spending time with her mom and aunt. Maggie and I went instead to hang out with Poli who was out with her friends for someone´s bday party. Went to her friend´s house and we got to meet all her fun friends. played some funny games and got to finally practice my spanish after very long. its a weird mix of spanish and portuguese and english thanks to brasil. obrigado. Maggie was really tired so she went back and Poli and I and her friends went to El Banco one more time. It was really fun but really packed. We danced for a little and I was exhausted so left the club around 4am. It was wierd seeing Poli...but in a good way. We are planning to hang out at least once more before I head out of this lovely continent. Im sad to be leaving Poli since she is sooooo much fun to hang out with but I´m glad to say that she will be visiting us sometime in December when she comes to work in the US again and also to see her sister who FINALLY got her visa to be with her husband of 2 years in Arizona. awww....
Hmm so yea, lets go back to where I left you last in Rio. I did end up being sick and had a terrible sleep that night but by morning I decided to have some sun for a cure and it worked. spent pretty much all day at the beach relaxing and playing in the water and drinking lovely matte and got cute "brasil coloured" anklets with Thomas, Melissa, Alex and Maggie. Afterwards went around and bought some shirts from La Garota de Ipanema for my brother and then found a bookstore/musicstore where i bought some good bossa nova music and samba music. Surprise surprise, the bookstore happened to be selling Harry Potter that night...IN ENGLISH!!! YAY!!! so i got my ticket for the book and then went back to the hotel before going out to see Fantastic Four with Tashman, Aaron and Jess. Wow!!! the movie was everything I expected it to be and more. Damn that Jessica Alba was HOTT!!! anyways, got back and found out that Kirk was going to help us stay up all night long since we had to leave the hotel by 5:30am to get to our flight to Brasilia on time. His plan was to take us all to this famous Rio club called HELP! which ended up being a club famous for all the prostitutes and transvestites begging to be picked up there. More to tell about it later. I unfortunately tried to go and get the Harry Potter book at midnight and therefore by the time i got back Aaron and Jess had already left for the club. Well first about Harry Potter. So i get to the bookstore and amazingly there is a line of about three hundred people (expected since the book is after all in english only at the moment). the people there were funny since they couldn´t read english (or at least not without a dictionary) but just wanted to be there for the harry potter party and say they got the book (which to get the book in rio means to get the book before EVERYONE in the US! HAHAHAH!!!). It was such a weird experience to be picking up the 6th book (which is incredible so far...about half way through...not had a lot of time to read unfortunately) in a foreign bookstore surrounded by foreign people who don´t speak the language. something about that moment. it was just cool and unique. anyways, i was waiting in line when i saw this girl who looked familiar. i sort of ignored it since it couldn´t possibly have been her but then she looked at me and gave me one of those inquisitorial looks as if she thought she knew me too. she came up to me and then i realized that it in fact was Maria...from GHP 2002, my Spanish class...who acted as Rose in our Spanish Caberet skit where I was Jack...of all the places to run into an old friend who i have not seen in three years, i meet her here...in Rio...waiting in line to buy harry potter...in all the bookstores of Rio...shes in the same one I am....what a WEIRD coincidence. Anyways we start talking and she explains that she is also doing a study abroad program in Rio in Portuguese through Emory where she goes to school. We start catching up and after we leave the bookstore we try to catch up with aaron and jess but they had already left. so we decide to go and grab drinks and dessert at a posh bar nearby. we reminice for a while and then she has to go so we say goodbye and promise to be friends on facebook. jajajaja!!! so i get back and realize that i still have to pack so i start packing and read a little of harry potter when aaron finally comes bursting into the room around 5am yelling something about too many prostitutes, a certain someone (i choose not to mention his name incase he gets in trouble) is terribly drunk along with everyone else and we have to be on the buses in 10 minutes to get to the airport on time. it was utter chaos for the next 10 minutes as i finish packing and then go to help jess to find her passed out in bed refusing to get up until i spill water on her. then i go to see if anyone else needs help and find out that jason has brought back two hookers from the nightclub and has done who knows what with them (hope he used that 8th condom!). Finally after much coercion the prostitutes left and everyone got on the bus. We just made our flight and everyone passed out happily as we flew to Brasilia.
Got to Brasilia and everyone was extremely hungover and tired from staying up all night and drinking so we all got to our hotel, The Manhatten Plaza, and immediately went to sleep. I woke up to a group of the Argentine students surrounding my bed as they tried to wake me up so we could start getting organized for the conference. Went to McDonalds for "dinner" at the extremely large Shopping Mall across the street. Bought lots of liquer for the party we were holding with the Argentines in the Hotel. Came back and Kirk took us all out for Italian so we could discuss the coming week and just hang out with the Argentines. Finally met my partner, Maria "Maro" de la Paz Stabile. She was really nice and very pretty and seemed to know a lot about the model un even though she had only done one model before. Anyways, got back to the hotel and the party started. Hung out and played drinking games as usual and danced to music and we all had a lot of fun. as the party wound down, aaron, jess and i moved the party to our room where we three went out yet again to the balcony to hang out and drink more...a LOT more. I don´t know what it is about balcony´s but they are "bad" news for aaron and I since we always end up getting really drunk and staying up really late (usually until sunrise). and guess what, it happened again. jess, aaron and i stayed up as usual talking about all sorts of stuff from religion to humanitarianism to just impressions of the group and stuff. it was a great talk and we hung out like this until around 6:30 where we saw the wierdest sunrise ever over the city of brasilia. the clouds were an ominous grey and black yet there were sections of clear sky where the vibrant hues of orange and red emerged, reflecting the sun. that combined with the whole reddish impression the city gives with it being so barren and it just led to an extremely bizzare but beautiful sunrise nonetheless.
Luckily we didn´t have to be at the Conference center on Sunday until around 1pm to check in and register. Got there and expereinced the first of many frustrating experiences with the bus and punctuality of the conference in general. Went to our large auditorium for the MDGs group and we all went through the rules and regulations and talked in general the goals of our conference. Afterwards left the conference center which was inconveniently across the river/lake to the Itaparaty Building for the slightly boring opening ceremonys. On the bus, Thomas and I met some really cute Brazilian girls, Priscila and Marielle, who were from PUC - Sao Paolo and were representing France in the Historical Committee (who simulates fictitious conferences between countries...this case, the Convention of Prague which should have occured before WWI and the Balkan Crisis but did not happen due to financial reasons). We were all starving and extremely grumpy for most of the ceremony so when it finally ended and the waiters started coming around with cocktails and salgados (snacks), we all pretty much attacked the waiters. There were mini coxinhas and mini kibes and puff pastries and crackers with cheese and lots of free champagne and red wine and beer. uh oh! Went back to the hotel and Maro and I realized that we needed to work on our speech so we went back to jess´s room and stole her computer and worked till about 4am on our speech.
Well at least for me the Model UN went about pretty uneventful. My committee was interesting as we looked at the Millenium Declaration and attempted to see what kind of progress was being made on the 8 Millenium Development Goals and what kind of further actions each country needed to take in order to meet the deadline fo 2015. Since there were 8 different goals, the goals were seperated into 4 seperate work groups: poverty, gender/education, health and environment. I was put in environment and my partner in poverty. Environment and Saudi Arabia was pretty uninteresting since there was not much to say."Oh, Saudi Arabia is doing what it needs to do to maintain environmental sustainability. We have good basic sanitation for everyone. No major deforestation is taking place. Almost everyone has clean drinking water. We need to work on desalinization projects, etc. So i basically spent most of my time either looking at the really hot brazilian delegate from Netherlands (Her name is Isabela) or else just watching everyone else argue about the most mundane things such as whether its right to uses words like "urge". It was quite amusing to have America and China in my work group. The only real problems i had were having to speak impromptly with my partner trying to whisper what she wanted me to say since she was too flustered to say it and also saying my speech because as much as I tried to slow down, it was impossible to complete my speech in the 1 minute I had to speak while also speaking slowly enough for everyone to understand. But apparently I spoke so fast that even though not many people understood what I had to say, I sounded intelligent so everyone thought that I knew my shit and that I would be a good delegate. hmm... The second day of the conference was really cool since my workgroup had the opportunity to go and visit the Congreso Nacional built by Niemeyer and actually go inside and have our meeting in one of the conference rooms complete with speakerphone systems. So anyways, as I was saying, pretty uneventful in terms of event at the actual conference in my work group. We finished the conference on Thursday and finally everyone agreed on the Millenium Declaration and it was passed by everyone except the US (go figure right?).
My main reason for going to the Model UN was partly to learn more about the UN but mainly to meet people. And boy did I meet some awesome people. The majority of the people at the conference were from of course Brasil with a large concentration from Sao Paulo studying at either USP or PUC-SP. Other than Brasil I met people from Peru, a large delgation from Guyana, people from France, Germany and even an awesome girl from South Africa named Sofie who was representing Zimbabwae.
more to come later... | 
