Argentina

Me voy pa' Mexico el 11 de septiembre. Voy el 11 de septiembre porque es cuando los boletos salen más barato. Go figure. I will be staying with some Mexican girls that couch surfed with me in Seattle. They will pick me up by donkey from the airport and we will have 3 day journey to their village. Here's a picture of them: My goals for the trip are not to get kidnapped and not to get the swine flu. Todavía no sé muchas detalles de mi viaje pero les aviso cuando sepa. Solo sé que estaré alla pa'el día de independencia. No es el cinco de mayo como muchos creen. El cinco de mayo marcó una batalla contra francia. El día de independencia es el 16 de septiembre. I will spend the first week with the girls at their university in Puebla, and then I intend to go to Mexico City where I will either Couch Surf, stay in a hostel, or stay with random people I meet along the way. That's all for now, more updates as I figure my shit out. Two more weeks of work...

So we went to the DJ Tiesto concert for 600 RD (around 20 bucks) and it was awesome. There were like 15,000 dominicans decked out with glow sticks and going crazy. Just a little background DJ Tiesto is a Danish DJ and is pretty renound for his techno. They had a sweet light show, fireworks, and even a girl dangle dancing from a hot air baloon to complete the scene. The concert supposedly started at 9 pm, we got there at 11 pm thinking that would be when DJ Tiesto would come out, but he didn´t start playing until around 1 am. At 4 am we were all technoed out so we left but it seemed like the concert was still in full swing. We had walked all around the city earlier in the day for about 5 hours so after 5 more hours of dancing to techno, I was cashed. We went with Esperanza and Carlitos who are the friends of Yaul who was the friend of Bibiana who Michael had met through Jet Blue in Seattle. It seems that if you make one friend you can integrate yourself into the friend network p...

What up. I am using the slowest keyboard I have ever seen. I type and it appears several seconds later. Anyway, I am in Santo Domingo right now. We found a nice little hotel and we are paying about $23 dollars each per night. Santo Domingo is a real city and it is NICE. I thought that the DR was a third world country when I was in PUerto Plata, but Santo Domingo is very nice. IT is actually the oldest city in the New World. Christopher Colombus set up shop in Santo Domingo when he mossied on over from Spain in 1492. Therefore the city has lots of history because its 500 plus years old. We walked for about 5 hours today through the Zona COlonial, along the Malecon and up into the surrounding residential barios. Tonight there is a possibility that we are going to go to a DJ Tiesta concert but we´ll see. DJ tiesta is one of the biggest techno artists in the world... but he´s Dutch so not that cool on the whole. Our friends back in Santiago hoooked us up with some people they k...

Ok everyone, I have some time to tell you a little bit more about the trip. We flew from SEATAC to JFK with no problems and had a 4 hour lay over. We ate dunken donuts and and people watched for the majority of the time. Then we had our flight to Puerto Plata which wasn´t full and I got some most excellent sleep. Customs was a breeze but we came out of the airport and it was a huge mess. Our directions were sketchy at best. Basically we knew we had to go to an area called Sosúa and look for a street called Calle Piano and from there we had to look for a restaurant called Casa Vientiuno and then it was the last house on the street. The guy we were CouchSurfing wiith told us that we could take a Guagua on the nearby highway to the house. Well, we got there and it was rainy extremely hard, we didn´t see the freeway, and we really didn´t know where to go. We exchanged some money in a bank and did the unthinkable... we took a taxi. We hosed the hell out of us and charged us 23$USD in...

Just a quick message since I am about to get picked up. We flew into Puerto Plata and stayed with a Spaniard named Josep in his sweet house outside of Puerto Plata. This is the first time I have really seen the third world up close. It was also a tale of two worlds because admist the poverty was an enormous walled off tourism resort complex that draws half a million tourists per year. Anyway, two days of motoconchos, guaguas, and Presidente and now we are in Santiago to meet up with some of Mike´s buddies. I am sitting in an internet cafe and we are waiting to get picked up by someone named Bibiana. I have so much detail to add to this quick message i just wanted to say what´s up. See ya. Taylor

Just a heads up that I will be going to the Dominican Republic for spring break with my buddy Mike from March 22nd to March 30th. Should be sweet because we both speak Spanish and we got super cheap plane tickets ($100) because he works for the airlines. I think we are planning to CouchSurf but we'll see what ends up happening. More to come.

Haven't updated in a while mostly because the purpose of my blog was to inform my family of my whereabouts and doings, but since they have been with me for the last few days there have been easier methods of communication. I showed my mom and my sister around Buenos Aires for three days and acted as a guide. On Wednesday we flew to Iguazu Falls which is the biggest waterfall in the world with over 5,000 cubic meters of water passing over the falls every second. To put that in perspective the next biggest falls, Victoria Falls, has 1,000 cubic meters of water pass over it ever second. And, according to wikipedia (a widely respected reference), Iguazu is the 4th most spectacular natural wonder after the Sergenti Migracion, the Galápagos Islands, and Grand Canyon. We took an obscene amount of pictures but unfortunately we don't have the cable to upload them. The falls were amazing, but the Disneylandification surrounding it was cringe worthy. We walked a shit ton, it was h...