MARCH 31 "Seis Nueve Cinco....Uno Uno Ocho Uno!"

This morning started with a fantastic breakfast cooked by Roquelle and Mariella. Eggs, bacon, fruit and pancakes w/ peanut butter & jelly. Wimen gave me my first cup of Mate and I'm hooked. Mate, pronounced "Mah-tay," is similar to hot green tea but you use a plant called yerba, pack it into a hollowed out gourd, pour on boiling water and sip it through a silver straw called a bombilla. Mate is the national drink of Uruguay, Argentina, and a few other countries and I have yet to find a group of people without at least one person carrying their Mate & a thermos of hot water to re-fill it with. It was excellent and tomorrow I'll be buying my own for sure.

After breakfast the students headed upstairs for a devo. After the devo was Elementary Spanish but it was the exact same this morning so I shot very little because I got a lot of great footage yesterday. So I got in touch with my boss and co-workers back home to find out what was going on and do a little long-distance work. About this time jet-lag and 20+ hours of solid travel hit so I headed upstairs to the loft to "write and rest my eyes." Haha, I woke up to students coming in to eat lunch.

Lunch was fried fish and it was GOOD. It was accompanied by rice, fruit, vegetables and some bread. I spent most of lunch talking with Rosalinda Walker about her travels to Africa as a missionary and the wildlife she encountered there. While we talked I also sat back and observed the community between the students themselves and with the professors. This is less of a group of people and more of a big family here. I'm sure they have their problems and drama, but there is a strong bond here and it's evident.

After lunch Ronnie, Scott and I walked with the students to University Catolica where several students are taking Intermediate Spanish. Today they had class in the student center so Spanish class was offset by people playing ping pong, studying and drinking Mate. It was interesting to see that in Uruguay, as well as the States, you can generally look at someone and tell whether or not they are a college student. Except for the Spanish being spoken, the scene could have easily taken place in the Bean Sprout at ACU. AFter the students were done with class, Scott and I made them pretend to enter the school building several times so I could get a few establishing shots for when we decided to tell the story of the students studying at University Catolica.

Due to several requests, I was going to attempt to film a cab ride home so people could see just how scary...er...entertaining Uruguayan traffic can be. I hailed a cab home and 2 students caught a ride with me. My cab driver was exceptionally friendly and as soon as I explained I didn't know much Spanish, he immediately slowed down his speech and made sure to use easy words (he didn't speak any English). People here are so friendly! I explained to him I was here filming students from Texas. He immediately said "You are lucky to get to film pretty girls for your job!" Then I explained they were here studying abroad and I was filming them for university advertising, I wasn't just here to film college girls! Once we started back to Casa ACU, I realized this filming was a waste. All the video-game style driving I talked about in yesterday's blog went out the window. I guess it was because I had a camera going but he drove like he was in America! Tomorrow I'll try to film inconspicuously from the back seat and maybe the driver won't notice and behave.

After getting to Casa ACU it was time for Wimen's Christianity in Culture class in the courtyard. In the university setting with 100 kids in class who didn't know me this was a tough class, as you tackle real-life issues, so it was very intense to be discussing these issues and questions with a group of 10 kids you live with.

After Christianity in Culture, I filmed Shelly Sander's Literature class at a local coffee shop (coffe here, by the way, is AWESOME). That film location was a learning experience for me as the lighting was a mix of fluorescent and incandescent and white-balancing and keeping the iris at a comfortable level took a lot of experimentation.

After filming, Ronnie, Wimen, Scott, Stephen, Nathan and I took a 30 minute walk to get some dinner at Don Peperone. Once again, great food, great conversation, great fun. Tomorrow's going to be a long day of filming around the house and at a few beaches, look forward to that summary video as it should be beautiful.

Until then.

MARCH 30 "I'm on a ... roof?"

After a quick breakfast, Ronnie, Scott, Stephen and I headed to Casa ACU. I started the day filming the Advanced Spanish class. The professor is a local Uruguayan and she is a mirror image of the seamstress in the movie, "The Incredibles." When I first walked in to film she asked me (in spanish), "Are you here to film the pretty girls? You are? OK, I'll leave," and she proceeded to hide behind the marker board. Funny lady!

Advanced Spanish was followed by lunch cooked by Roquelle and Mariella. They made a traditional Uruguayan end-of-the-month meal called gnocchi. You eat it at the end of the month because by then you're supposed to be low on funds and need to eat something cheap, yet filling. It was great!

After Lunch I went upstairs to shoot Dr. Shelly Sanders' Literature class. It was a rather un-eventful, typical Study Abroad class until one of the students fell asleep. While it's bad enough to fall asleep in a small class, it's even worse when you're sitting right next to your teacher! That's right, one of the students fell asleep sitting right next to Dr. Sanders. Needless to say she was woken up and a fun laugh was shared by all.

After filming Dr. Sanders' class, Ronnie, Scott, Stephen and I caught a bus to the "old town." The bus ride cost a mere 75 cents each! When we got to the old town we wandered through a few markets selling street art and Mates (more on Matas in a later blog). Stephen was a fantastic tour guide explaining the history of the town and the different buildings and monuments we saw. The most memorable was a HUGE monument erected to mark the tomb of Artigas. Above ground all there is is a large marble statue of a man on a horse, but follow the stairs underground and you walk into a dimly lit room roughly 100' x 100' with nothing in it but an Urn, highlighted by a single beam of light from the ceiling. On either side is an armed guard, a la the guys with the big fuzzy hats in England. No movement, no facial expressions, nothing. Talk about a boring job!

After walking around town we caught a cab back to Casa ACU to film some of Wimon Walker's class. It's the only class that every student is enrolled in so it was a good filming opportunity to catch all the students in one place. Back to the cab ride, though. After riding in several taxi's in Uruguay, all I can really say is video games like Grand Theft Auto, where you speed around a city with no regard for laws or other traffic, are quite about accurate. In Uruguay, green lights don't mean go. The light for the cross traffic turning Yellow means "go ahead and go." Lanes? What are lanes? There's no stripes painted in the road, apparently you just guess how many cars can fit across the road and figure it out from there. I grabbed the door grip more than one time on a few of today's rides! Definitely an experience I won't soon forget! I'll try to video a cab ride before we leave.

After Wimon's class I went to the roof with Ronnie, and Scott to get some scenic shots of Montevideo. While Ronnie shot various students conversing on the roof, I set up a time-lapse of the sunset over the city for about an hour. During that hour I had a lengthy conversation with a Basset Hound down below (lots of howling back and forth!), and I learned that when bored, an empty, plastic 20oz Coke bottle actually makes a very comfortable pillow. I'll upload the time-lapse video at the end of today's blog.

Dinner was a great experience! Ronnie, Scott, Stephen, the Sanders, the Walkers and I went across town to a restaurant called Teracotta. However, Terractta was closed on Mondays so we walked a little ways down the street and found a small restaurant called "Taco Muñoz." The host/waiter/cook (only one person owned and ran the place) was named Ruben "Taco" Muñoz and he was a riot! He kept making jokes and definitely made the meal entertaining as well as delicious. He told us about his life, how he spent 30 years in Argentina learning to cook before coming to Uruguay and how he's had this restaurant for a little over 4 years. The food was excellent and the service was even better. Definitely one of the best dining experiences of my life. On top of that, it was CHEAP! I hope to make a return visit before we leave for Buenos Aires later in the week.

I'm sure I'm forgetting a lot of what went on today (it was BUSY), but hopefully this is enough for those of you who care to know what I'm getting to experience!

Until tomorrow!

Oh, here's that sunset I told you about...

Here's a summary of what I shot on Day 2.

MARCH 29 "Shoulda gone Left"

Despite the ridiculous wind in Abilene when we took off, our flight to Dallas was relatively smooth (for that flight, anyway). The only time the flight got scary was right before we began our decent the pilot got on the P.A. to let us know that it might be really bumpy on the way into Dallas. As he's making his announcement, an imminent bad-tv-movie-style alarm beings beeping ominously behind him. He seemed concerned as he started to converse with his co-pilot as he got off the P.A. Despite the alarm and pilot warning, the flight was good and not too bumpy at all.

Dallas to Miami was pretty uneventful, though Abilene Regional is Buckingham Palace compared to Miami Intl. The gate area was lined every few feet with yellow trash-cans marked "NO TRASH" collecting all the leaks from the ceiling. Did I mention it wasn't raining? But the ceiling was still leaking.

We boarded a 777 bound for Buenos Aires at about 10pm Texas time. The flight was smooth and I was lucky enough to have an empty seat next to me. The lady just on the other side of that seat kept waving her daughter from farther back in the plane to come sit by her, but I had a plan. Every time I heard her walking up or caught her reflection in the in-seat monitor (I watched "Yes-Man"...good flick), I would close my eyes, hang my mouth open a little bit and breathe loud. Ya know, the old "sleeping passenger" trick. It worked every time and I got to have an empty seat to lean on when I finally got tired enough to sleep. After catching about 3 hours of sleep, some moron in the row by the window realized it was light outside and flipped up both of his window shades. The cabin went from a nice pitch-black to noonday sun. Not cool. That was the end of my sleep.

My adventure began soon after landing in Buenos Aires. We had a connecting flight to Montevideo, and thank goodness it was a 2 hour layover. As I exited the plane you I a choice to go left, or right. However there were no signs that I could see, so I followed the flow of traffic to the right. Not too long after that I saw the photographer, Ronnie Ruiz, coming my way so I figured I was on the right track. We got downstairs to Immagration and began the tedious caddle-herding back and forth through the ropes until we got up to the window. We never did see Scott Kilmer or Stephen Shumaker (the other half of our party) but we figured they must have gone a different way. Turns out, we weren't supposed to go through Immigration yet. After getting turned away from several helpful airport employees who flat out said "no" when I asked for help, we finally found our way back to the gate where our next flight was boarding. The only problem was, we had been admitted into the country of Argentina. So we had to pay a $8 exit fee to get back out! That's right. Ronnie and I visited Argentina for a grand total of 3 minutes and have the entrance/exit stamps in our passports to prove it!

Soon after we got to the gate we found Kilmer and Shumaker and had a good laugh of it. Then the 12 people going to Montevideo (it's a 30-minute, dallas to Abilene type trip), boarded the huge 767. That's right. The same plane I flew to Europe on was being used to transport a handfull of people 150 miles to Montevideo. I can't complain though. I had an entire row to stretch out.

After landing in Montevideo we were greated by Wimon and Rosalinda Walker who drove us straight to the Feria. The Feria is an outdoor market, similar to what I filmed in Spain, that only happens on Sunday. Lots of tables of fresh produce, clothing, pirated DVDs, and random crap. One table was even selling dental equipment! We met up with Shelly and Nathan Sanders and 3 students and filmed them shopping and talking to locals for an hour or so before meeting up at a restaurant to eat lunch. Great food. I had some kind of sandwich called a "chivo" something or other. It was just a cut of steak, egg, tomato, and lettuce on a bun, but it was great.

After a quick shower and unpack at the hotel, we headed off to Casa ACU to meet up with the students. It is a huge building that used to be a coffee processing factory. It butts right up to a church that the program seems to be able to utilize whenever necessary.

Immediately we met up with some folks on the roof cooking our amazing dinner and slowly but surely the students came up and introduced themselves. Let me say that my Spanish is NOWHERE near where I thought it was!

Dinner consisted of Steak, Chorizo, Ribs, Chicken, Bread & Salad with no dressing
and Dolce de Leche Ice Cream. Yes, I ate all of that. They don't take too kindly if you turn down food! It was definitely a memorable meal.

After dinner we returned to the rooftop for a devo. My camera light died so the McGuiver in me had the brilliant idea to open up a blank page in Microsoft Word and use the laptop as ambient light. It worked! Yet another use for Office! It was an amazing experience singing praises to the Lord in both English and Spanish on a rooftop overlooking Montevideo. There was a party going on a few rooftops over and they weren't much of a distraction due to the amazing praises being sung.

I can't wait for tomorrow.

Oh yea, I have no internt in the hotel (refuse to pay $6/hour) so I'll update as I can from the Casa ACU. I'll try to get some videos up each day.

Here's a summary of what I shot on Day 1.