I am taking 5 classes, 4 at IES and 1 at IUNA a local university. Because I only have class 3 days a week, Mondays are rough. I am at IES from 11 to 8 with a break from 2:30 to 6 to eat lunch and do homework or whatever needs to be done! I started off with Spanish 300 with only 7 people in my class! All girls! My teacher's name is Vale Tetti- very young, cute, friendly etc so that class is going to be fun and I'm glad it is so small! Then I have poetry with an older man as my teacher who LOVES poetry. He was going on and on in spanish about the deeper meaning of poetry and how each word has a purpose and how he wants us to really enjoy it. He seems nice and some girls who were here last year and has his class loved him and said the class wasn't too hard so that's always good to hear! Both spanish and poetry meet twice a week (Monday and Wednesday). Then at 6 I have my Service Learning class. I thought this class was going to be very interesting because each week's class is related to different issues in society (mostly related to poverty) and then out of class you have a placement in the community to volunteer at for 8 hours and with all of my free time Thursday and Friday I will be glad to have something to do besides go to the gym and do homework!! But I left the first class very confused and overwhelmed. I think that was mostly related to how it was such a long day in ALL spanish with new people and everything so hopefully that will be the worst and it will start to get a little better! But it doesn't help that we have basically 30 pages printed out on computer paper of reading in spanish for homework!!! Oh well each day brings new challenges and I will have to just do the best I can! I guess I didn't really think about how different it would be to have all of my classes in only spanish but when I got home on Monday night and was trying to skype with my mom I could barely talk from being so mentally tired! I'm sure I will get used to it and hopefully it will improve my spanish but these first weeks of class are going to be much harder than if they were all in english!!
Tuesday I had my Cultural Icons and Global Commodities class. I had heard this class had so much reading blah blah blah but I loved it!! It was so interesting and my teacher is crazy looking. Young guy probably mid 20's with skinny jeans, funky tennis shoes, a tight black sweatshirt and pretty long hair he kept running his hand through. Needless to say it only makes the class more interesting!! We study about 5 different topics that are the most prevalent icons of Argentina (gauchos, tango, Evita, and i can't remember the others!) It definitely is a lot of reading and I chose to do my presentation on Tuesday (tomorrow). It is about gauchos which I studied last semester in Latin American culture and we only have to do 1 the whole semester so it will be good to get it over with even though it took a lot of hours to thoroughly read everything and get the powerpoint done! Usually I have tango on Tuesdays from 6-10 but it doesn't start until tomorrow the 23rd.
The highlight of the rest of the week was St. Patricks day on Wednesday. I have never really celebrated St. Patricks day and gone all out in green but some of the other people here LOVE this holiday! I didn't know that it is such a big deal in Buenos Aires but supposedly there is a very large Irish population! We were going to go to a pub crawl where you go between different irish pubs but it was terrriblleeee weather- so rainy! So that kind of put a damper on our plans. Then we found out about this street called Reconquista that is blocked off from cars and is just a crazy celebration. It is on wikipedia and said that in 2006 there were 50000 people!!!! I guess this is a huge city! I just ended up going to a bar that was having St. Patricks day specials and then met up with a friend from home on Reconquista. A fun night but would have been better if there had been less rain!
Friday was the Wofford game. There was so much anticipation built up and I just wish we had won!!! We didn't think we would get it on the tv so all the Wofford people headed over to 2 girls' apartment and had the game set up on the internet on 2 computers! The connection was bumpy so Jim Allen called the Alamo (where we watched the first game) and they were showing it! It turned out they synched their computer to it because the bar tenders were wisconsin fans! So during half time we all hopped in cabs to go across the city. Going in to half time we were pretty far behind but by the time we arrived at the Alamo we had tied it up. All of us were so enthusiastic and I don't think anyone in the bar even knew what Wofford was until we arrived! We were sad to see the terriers lose but they tried hard! It was still lots of fun to cheer on our team from Argentina! The rest of the weekend wasn't too exciting... sad to say I had a migraine Friday and an abdominal migraine Saturday and Sunday did homework. Saturday night though I did go to this wonderful dinner with the Wofford girls and Meagan! i had this calzone that was HUGE and so yummy! I'm probably going to take my family there when they visit :) Regardless of the bumps in the road I am still loving Buenos Aires! This Wednesday is a national holiday so I only have a 2 day school week!! I'll try to update in less than a week this time!!
No comments:
Post a Comment