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