So today was the first day of my soon to be life in Argentina. I think it is going to ruin everything!! lol
Haha no but it was really hard to go to our orientation this morning at 9. I couldn't seem to fall alseep last night until around 230, blech. But anyway, the orientation was really long as well... but good i suppose to finally know what is going with school and everything. One thing I have really noticed on this trip so far is how horrible americans are. We travel all the way to another country just to be loud and speak in English. I don't get it. So you can tell from this sentiment that I mostly spent the day with Adelaide, the French girl from my hostel lol. I'm really loving trying to speak Spanish and learning how to explain myself better. It's weird and I don;t really know where all this confidence came from lol. It hasn't been that hard to push myself and talk to people I don't know in a language I'm not that awesome at haha.
Anyway- the orientation. We first listened to some people talk about the university in general. Blah blah, okay nice to know and everything. Also a little tango show by the tango professors. Man it is crazy how obsessed this town is with tango, it's great. After the first little meeting deal, we all (as in 300 of us) went on a tour of the city like real touristas. we saw some of the things Adelaide and I had already saw, like la Plaza de Mayo with la Casa Rosada (the pink house- yeah it's actually pink haha), etc. From downtown we headed towards La Boca, un barrio in the southern part of Buenos Aires. The bus dropped us off in a little shopping district called Las Caminitas near the soccer stadium of La Boca Juniors. The only way I can think to describe it is... cheesy and touristy. there in the middle of this old, not very good nieghborhood were all these bright, gaudy buildings selling little touristy items. Every 20 feet or so there were a couple of tango dancers who would pose with people for pictures or teach tango in 15 minutes. I dunno the enviroment was really interesting but not really my kind of thing. After caminitas we drove more thorugh La Boca and I saw what one would normally think of when one thinks of "Latin America"- la pobreza. Shacks contructed of all sorts of things, dirty streets and rundown buildings, people struggling to survive. I won't dsay it was shocking because of course every huge city has partes feas y buenos but it made me sad because.. I don't know. Behind all the bright tiendas and touristy attractions was la vida real of the people who aren't really associated with being argentine.
After the tour, the instructors of some of the classes we can take gave some mini presentations about their courses. I am sort of scared because the classes I was interested in taking, (like Argentina facing globalization and Latin American political systems) seemed really hard. Each of the professors warned us about the content being difficult and only accepting students who have perfect or native spanish. bleh- scary!! So we shall see about that haha. I'm going to try them still I think because they're exactly what I want to study and will be good if I can survive haha. I actually get to register for classes on Thursday and from there we have the first tow weeks to see how we like the classes.
So after all of this (it was around 5) we had ot take a placement test for Spanish. God did it make me feel stupid lol. It was all these little grammar things that I learned in high school but aren't really that important and I couldn't really remember. I thought my Spanish was going well until then haha. I really just don't want to take an actually class jusr for Spanish here, espeically since all of my economics and politics etc classes are already in Spanish. Another thing I'll just have to see about haha.
Now I am starving because I have only eaten this weird sandwich they gave us at the orientation. I am trying to get used to the Argentine eating schedule still haha. When I told someone here that I was hungry and going to eat they thought I was loca haha. mmk I think that's all for today. Tal luego boludos!