Nine days left

Suddenly, I am feeling quite ready to be heading home. I don't know if it was my encounter with the Artful Dodger yesterday at the train station, the long and exhausing bus ride home from Iguazu, or just general and all-consuming exhaustion, but somehow I find myself glad that after today I only have ten more days in Buenos Aires. I'm ready to be back in my real life.

That's not to say that I'm not happy to be here, and maybe after I get in a little more sleem my enthusiasm will return. But right now, I am just downright exhausted and I'm having trouble recovering my momentum.

My Spanish continues to improve. I had an interesting conversation with the woman sitting next to me on the bus back to BA. She told me her entire life story in about five minutes. She's starting a second career in international relations and wants to work for the UN. Somehow, we got onto the topic of why people in Argentina have so little faith in their government. She talked about the military government in the 70s and 80s, which no one had ever mentioned to me before. She said that when they went to war to try and win the Falkland Islands from England, the military government asked everyone to give their gold, their heirlooms, their most valuable items to the government to support the boys going to war. But rather than putting the items to that use, the military kept the riches for themselves and sent the boys to die. "How can you ever trust a government after that?" she asked me, and I had no answer.

She seemed to think that this was a problem that the US had in hand--that such things would never happen there. "When someone commits a crime there, they go to prison," she said. "It's all clear, and it's all organized."

I didn't have the energy or vocabulary to disagree, but it made me think a lot. More than anything it made me wonder why, after everything that has happened in the US over the past several decades--Vietnam, Watergate, Iran Contra...the list goes on--where things military are concerned, at least, people are still so willing to trust that the government is being truthful. I wonder if that will continue after this war is over. Assuming it ends.