Chile and Argentina

Leaving Chile proved to be a bit harder than I anticipated. I absent-mindedly tossed out my deportation slip, which turned out to be not so great for crossing the boarder, and I got a pretty raw deal on my bus ticket back Argentina--silly me, I thought a bus ticket meant I would get to ride on a  bus, but no,  a crazy man in a 4-door sedan drove me 8 and a half hours through the desert. After almost hitting two sheep and a one llama, and actually hitting a gigantic metal pipe, we arrived in Salta, Argentina. The city itself was very intimate, and very European, and surprisingly, after a month a half of sleeping in a tent or a hostel in the middle of the desert, I was happy to be in a city once again. I went to the Museum of Archaeology in Salta, and saw one of the three famous "mountain children"-- kids selected in the 15th century for sacrifice because of their beauty, whose bodies were discovered perfectly preserved in the 1900's. Before Leaving Salta for Buenos Aires, I went to the community orchestra and saw an incredible blend of South American and Western music--it was fantastic. 

Christmas with my family was so much fun. We ate delicious meals in Buenos Aires, laughed and lounged for a week on the beaches of Pinamar (6 hours south of the city), and generally talked our faces off day and night. A week after my parents left, my friend Felicia arrived in BA for 8 days of more fun. We spent a night in Uruguay, tanning on the beach, and two at the Iguazu waterfalls on the border of Brazil and Argentina, 18 hours outside the city. Felicia had her first hostel experience, and everything went well--no passports stolen, no creepy guys lurking around the room at night, and sugar-infused breakfasts were included. 

Tomorrow I go back to work on the film project I participated in late last year. I have five scenes that I need to film in a two-day span, which will be fun, but exhausting. My friend Pittelli is also arriving tonight, so I have lots to look forward to in my last two weeks here in Argentina. In anticipation of graduate school interview offers, I am flying back to the United States the 27th of January, and if I get accepted to school, I won't come back to Buenos Aires. I'm having trouble grasping the fact that my adventure is coming to close, so i'm going to pack in as much as I can for the next 9 days.