Back to School

Classes! Monday was our first official day of school (although some people had classes at UCA, the private University last week). Despite an unhealthy amount of anxiety, I would say that so far its going really well!

Monday went about as smoothly as possible.

On Sunday a friend and I mapped out how to get to our UBA classes and walked over to the building so that we were ready Monday morning (the same routine as freshman year at Georgetown). The day before classes started the building looked eerily deserted, but is much better now that its filled with people.

Each specific department of UBA has its own building (all spread throughout the city), so all of my classes are in one of the two Social Science buildings. Since the Political Science classes are all held in the building it is PACKED with campaign posters and volunteers. I wanted to take a picture of the stairwell and halls because its amazing, but thought that might look a little weird...maybe later in the semester. The main floor has tables set up with every political party and volunteers there to answer your questions. There isn't any white space in the stairwell or halls but instead huge, colorful posters. This is accompanied by students who briefly interrupt classes every 20 minutes or so to pass out pamphlets and talk about their candidates. What I would give to live in a country that is so politically engaged!

Despite every thing else about UBA being difficult, they make it very easy to find your classes the first day with giant bulletin boards of classroom numbers on the ground floor. I had no trouble finding my two Monday classes: Argentine History and Latin American Politics.

First us was Argentine History. It was the "practica" which is the equivalent of a recitation for us. I was pleasantly surprised when I met another exchange student from Minnesota outside of the classroom - made me much less nervous for my first Argentine class! The professor was extremely nice and very easy to understand. She had us introduce ourselves to the class since we were exchange students and after class she said that we could email her if we ever have a problem understanding something.

I even talked to one student in my class! (Our program staff really wanted us to talk to an Argentine in our classes...). He had studied in Minnesota for a year and was really friendly. Then while waiting for my second class I had a long conversation about the upcoming election with a girl going into a different class. Maybe I can make porteno friends after all!

After class I headed over to the "fotocopieria" (photocopy store). Instead of buying textbooks or even downloading articles from online, classes here develop reading packets that they then give to local photocopy stores (or in the case of UBA, there's a store run by students). You just have to tell them your professor's name and they give you a packet of readings! Its also a lot cheaper than buying a book or even printing it yourself. All of my readings for the first 4 weeks of class were 5 US dollars!

Then in the evening I had Latin American Politics. This class is about half exchange students, which I'm not wild about, but at least their from the US, Denmark, and Germany, so there's a bit of variety. The professor was also easy to understand and the class seems like it will be interesting.

Even though Monday was a complete success, Tuesday had a few more bumps in the road.

I knew that it was going to be a somewhat rough day when while walking to my bus stop a woman dumped water off of her balcony onto my head.

My first class was with my program and went very well. It was my Seminar on Service Learning. We're visiting the organizations that we might want to work with for the semester this week and next and then will decide by the end of next week. The classroom aspect of the course also seems interesting since we'll be learning a bit about social policy and social history of Buenos Aires.

After that class I headed back to UBA. I gave myself a little bit of time to find the classrooms for my two classes today. After scouring the bulletin board I absolutely could not find my first class. I asked a student there for help and when he couldn't find it either he motioned to the computer and the student portal, but I had no idea what I was doing (much to his surprise). So he sent me off to the Department of Students which then sent me off to the Department of Profesors, who told me that the class was in the Sociology department, which is housed in a different building (even though the other sections of the same class were in the Political Science department). Fortunately for me, all sociology courses have been postponed to next week so I didn't have to sprint across the city to get there.

I used my newly free 2 hours to check out the student-run cafe in the building, which boasts 75 cent coffee!

Then I had my Social Policy course. I got to class 5 minutes early. The rest of the 30-ish person class rolled in 15 minutes late and all sat on the other side of the classroom since they all knew each other. The course is a part of the "Trabajo Social" or Social Work major, that I'm guessing is really small and so all the students in the major know each other. This meant that there was a lot of chit-chat during lecture, making it very difficult to understand the professor. Oh, and the fact that he mumbled and had his hand covering his mouth the whole time didn't help. Basically, I only got about half of what he said and received odd looks by the whole clique of the class the entire time. Needless to say, probably not staying in that course.

Tomorrow I don't have any classes so I'll be going to meet with two of the organizations that I might do projects with for my service learning seminar!