Hi fellow travelers, I'm Ethan and I'll be talking to you today about my study abroad trip to Mexico City, where I got to study at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, a prestigeous institution. MC was the biggest city I have ever been to, and I loved it. Coming from Oregon, USA, I grew up loving the natural environment. That is the image of good my family taught me at a young age, and I believed it without thinking. They are big in the Sierra Club, and I decided to study at UANT because it was in a unique natural environment. I wanted to study ice cores that told how things used to be before human impact began. This trip changed my mind about a lot of things. After two years at UANT, I decided I had to get some diverse stuff on my resume. I thought "Mexico is diverse" and "I want to see chinampas agriculture in action." So UANT approved it, and last semester I was off. I flew first to Buenos Aires, then caught a plane to Mexico City. Buenos Aires means "Nice Air" and it pretty much lived up to its name. No turbulance or anything like that. The trip to Mexico was different. We flew into some "Malos Aires" over the rain forest. At first I cringed at all the deforestation they were doing out the window, I really wished I didn't have a window seat but I did. I saw it all. Then like a sign from the earth, to me in the plane, I saw a heart. It was as if the earth was telling me it loved what the Brazilian loggers were doing to it. At first I was like, WTF! I couldn't get that image out of my mind. What if I was wrong this whole time? My whole life? When the plane flew over Mexico City, I saw it differently. I snapped a sweet shot of unending urban sprawl. Only now I saw it as something good. Knowing the earth actually likes what people do to it. This made the trip a lot better. My host family took me home, and showed me their cool tiki bar. We had a Tekate beer (I think I'm spelling that right). Then we went to the cemetary and they worshiped their ancestors. That was pretty weird, especially because I had no idea what they were saying and they weren't translating anything for me. But I went with it. Me casa, su casa. Next day I went to check into the National Autonomous University. It was cool. I went to orientation but halfway through found out it was actually a conference by the World Bank, and no one knew about an orientation. Some weeks went by and I was going to classes, but they were all in Spanish. I turned stuff in in English on the environment and how the whole movement is a sham. No one said anything. I wrote a paper on slavery too, after seeing a mural showing Mexican slaves working on plantations somewhere near either a river called Diego or a river in what I gather is now San Diego. When the semester ended, I went to see the standard sights like the Aztec pyramid. It was cool. The Mayan pyramid was a lot more advanced than I thought it would be, which was a big surprise. It shows how far a culture can progress in only a short time. I needed some r&r by then, so I took some time off. I went camping, still couldn't find the illusive chinampas, but I did find a grisly sight: a monument to the Americans sacrificed by the Aztecs and Mayans. I paid my own tribute to them, my countrymen long forgotton. This was the most emotional part of my journey, and I realized people travel to find themselves. I think I found myself on that island of decapitated dolls. Then, disaster struck. I went to sign out at the university, and they had no idea who I was. "I've been here all semester," I said. The translator told them that. I showed them the paperwork from the Internet, signed by the authorities at UANT. They looked puzzled, then the guy just busted out laughing. "What?" I asked. I was getting frustrated. The translator told me this was actually the wrong university, it was the National Autonomous Institute of Technology of Mexico, not the National Autonomous University. I was pissed. How could I lose a semester at the wrong school? No one told me anything like this could happen on a study abroad trip. What did they do with all my research papers? I asked for them back but no one knew where they were, as if they were deleated. What could I do? I got on the next plane back to Antarctica. We took off and as we flew over the Pampas, I saw some things that burned me up inside. First, the earth told me to literally go f^ck myself, then, as we went over the town of Crespo, the earth sent me a totally different message.