Clare Elsewhere

When I first started to plan out my trip to Brazil, I listed Foz do Iguaçu as a priority. It is a famous series of waterfalls forming the border of Argentina and Brazil, recently hosted the X-Games, and is featured in many tourism brochures and pictures of Brazil. It even played a part of an Indiana Jones movie. Beyond all this, I had heard that it was one of the Seven Wonders of  the World. The idea of Seven Wonders definitely piqued my interest, and I began to research it more. After all the amazing places I have visited, would this be my third Wonder? My fourth? Would it be feasible to see all Seven? A simple Wikipedia reference showed how little I truly knew. 'Seven Wonders' has essentially devolved from an impressive title into a tourism gimmick, with more than ten international lists and many countries holding their own. There are the Seven Natural, the Seven Man-made, the Ancient, the Modern, those of the Medieval Mind, those from the Middle Ages, Seven of Modern Engin

It is interesting how the human mind works when presented with the unknown. There is a brief period of shock, acknowledgement, and observation where we stand just absorbing the experience, marveling at the novelty. But our mind isn't too comfortable with foreign territory, and quickly works to associate these new observations with things which we already know: it compares, contrasts, and builds upon our previous memories, tying the unknown to familiar concepts, relating it to established knowledge, rationalizing. The cliff is about a football field high, it smells like coconut water, 7*7=49 because seven 7s added together is 49: all concepts which we know and remember, welcome as new knowledge and learning because we can base them off their relationships with what we already knew, we can base them off our comparisons to that information. But almost everything we learn, we "base off" something else. This past week our program visited Rio de Janeiro, and that's