Buenos Aires Fall 2010: Un mes...

Hello Everyone!

I know its been a while and I'm sorry about that. I've been here for almost a month now! Three weeks for sure...

The 5th-6th of August we went to San Antonio de Areco with the program which is a little down in the provence of Buenos Aires (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_de_Areco) and it was great to get out of the city for a little bit! The landscape was much like Iowa's so I found myself being really nostalgic and maybe realizing I'm not the city girl I thought I was? I'm not sure I just happen to miss Iowa a lot. Anyways, it was nice to experience a bit of 'real Argentina' because any porteno can tell you that Buenos Aires and Argentina have few similarities. So the little FLACSO trip was pretty eventful for such a short little trip. I rode a horse for the first time, took a lovely bikeride at sunset around the town, ate lots and lots of food (especially meat oh my god the meat toooo much) accidently broke a window with Mando the night they brought us to a restaurant in the woods and basically forced us to party, witnessed a man give a solo performance with his horse which included him straddling the horse on it's back, spooning it on the ground, and all other kinds of weird intimate things........ all in all a great little trip!

Classes began at the start of last week. I've figured my schedule out so that I don't have classes on Fridays which will make traveling on the weekends more convenient. I want to go to Uruguay, the Mendoza region (gotta try dat wine), and maybeeee Santiago, Chile to visit Anna Armstrong but she is coming here during September which is really exciting!

Anyways so I'm taking several classes at FLACSO - International Relations of Latin America, Seminar on Volunteerism and Service Learning, and New Cinema of Argentina, along with my my grammer/oral skills classes. This past Thursday I shopped two classes at UBA - one at Ciencias Sociales and another at Filosofia y Letras. It was probably one of the scariest/most intimidating school experiences of my life but reallllyyyy exciting. I was unusually one of the first people to my morning class and people kept coming in throughout the entire first hour without the professor even flinching! Oh forgot to mention that all of the UBA buildings are the craziest places I have ever tried to learn in. Graffiti all over the walls, posters upon posters about protests and socialists groups, everybody smoking cigarettes in the hallways, no toilet paper in the bathrooms..... Anyways so my first UBA class went alright but my professor is this really old man (who turns out is really famous socialist sociologist ... so we'lll see how that goes! His name is Emilio de Ipola - google him! He has 5 books for sale on amazon.com) who was half asleep when he started his lecture so it was really hard to understand but as time when he got more and more lively and made everyone in class giggle. I got an Argentine girls email address after class so I already have one new friend in that class! I think its going to be interesting topic just way more sociology-based than im used to. The second class I went to ended up being just about Plato/Aristotle but I understood everything that was going on so thank you Professor Meehan for teaching me enough to survive the first day of a philosophy seminar! But it was really cool to be in the Filosofia y Letras building. because I got to see the famous che guevara classroom.

not my picture but just to give you an idea of UBA buildings - thats an entrance to the one where i will take a class!

okay enough about school! what else have I been up to..... hmmmmmmm well right now the city is in the midst of the International Tango Festival so last night a bunch of us went to a free performance. Great music, it just always weirds me out how traditionally male dominated the performances are. Of course the dance was created for a man and a woman but the music is rarely performed by women. But the dance is really sexy you guys. The partners hold their faces really close together and the woman has to do some many slinky moves with her legs sometimes it looks like she is trying to tie a knot between her leg and her partners.

Anyways my host parents are gone for the weekend again! This past week was my host mom's birthday (she turned 61 and my host dad is turning 70 in a week) so they are celebrating their birthdays together in the countryside. Earlier in the week her daughter came over with her boyfriend and we all had mate. Mate is a delicious earthy tea that is really popular in Argentine. The way its served and shared is really specific because its a traditional drink. But it was really nice sitting around, sipping mate, and chatting with my host family.

I have so much reading to do! All of its in spanish obviously oy vey. Anyways I should probably get back to that. We didnt have classes today (monday) because its some holiday so obviously i left all my homework until today.

HASTA LUEGO! i'll try to update more regularly, perhaps with shorter entries/lil stories + more pictures. But just know that i'm settling in everyone! One month in, four to go....!!!!