...oh yeah, that too

so i know it's hard to believe but i actually am also here to go to school. classes started two weeks ago, and though i thought going to bariloche would make me miss classes, i ended up dropping all the classes i missed so there you have it. from the twelve or so classes i registered for, i narrowed it down to the four i am going to take:
1. intensive spanish level 6 (8 being native speaker)
2. aprendizaje y servicio--one of the classes at the program. an hour and a half of class time per week and a minimum of hours of service at one of several organizations the program has a relationship with. some of them include the organization of the mothers of the plaza de mayo, teaching english to kids or adults...i dont know what i will choose. i think i would prefer to work with a population rather than in an office, as the mothers of the plaza de mayo would be, for example, but im not sure and want to check everything out first. the class part seems interesting too- it looks like it will be about what "community service" really means--sustainability and most efficient use of resources...we shall see. the reading for this week was from the uk guardian newspaper about whether british kids taking gap years to volunteer abroad are really just "new colonists." right up my alley.
3. latin american social thought- a class at the university of buenos aires (uba) that was recommended to me by Silvina, the woman i live with, who has a sociology degree from the uba. its crazy because we have only had one class so far but he was mentioning all these concepts i have discussed in scripps classes, with crowley, aisenberg, perez de mendiola--imaginary communities, orientalism, epistemology...and yet i have read hardly any of the authors on the syllabus. its so amazing--like core goes argentine. really, i feel like i am retaking schools of cultural criticism, but completely from a latin american perspective. i introduced myself to the professor at the end of the class and he was extremely welcoming, and said that it would be very difficult but that i should definitely stick through it, that its worth it...im very excited. its also good that there are two other kids from my program (ie american) that i really really like, because the readings are extremely long and dense. we are already splitting it up.
4. photographic documentation and journalistic discourse- basically a class about photojournalism and its role in how we conceptualize our history and reality...or something. i wasnt going to take it but i went and loved the professor and loved the syllabus and i think it will be very interesting. a plus is that the professor is a photojournalist himself and a part of the class is learning about photography ie taking pictures. and i like taking pictures.

i know i have told this to some of you but one consequence of the uba being completely free for argentines is that less than 30% of the professors are paid. those that are paid do not earn enough to live solely on that income. in addition, silvina informed me that almost a majority of the professors in the social sciences were detained during the dirty war for months to years, between the ages of around 18-25. even though i should have realized this, to hear that fact was so stunning to me. as a result of this, academia, expression, literature and protest are absolutely cherished. when you walk into the building, there is not an inch of the wall uncovered with giant posters and fliers mostly with communist, marxist, trotskyist (i didnt know there was such an ist), socialist, and feminist messages, as well as plenty demanding ingleses y yanquis afuera (Out with the english and yankees) and human rights. to get into the building you have to pass through this entry room full of tables of different groups handing out and selling a million and a half pamphlets and fliers. you know me, i cant help but talk to people and man were they eager to finally have someone who actually wants to listen to them. i have had so many interesting conversations with people just by asking them what they are doing. i honestly was almost moved to tears when i first walked in...i just thought about ulysses and how we pride ourselves in the us on all our "freedom," like we may not be perfect but at least we have our freedom and god help those who try to stifle the freedom of speech. three seconds in that building and it was so crystal clear to me how stifled we really are. the fact that for a politician to proclaim himself a socialist would be political suicide is evidence enough of how far we are from the ideals of freedom that we so freely use as justification to invade, occupy and oppress other nations. meh. it made me feel angry and cheated. even in the most liberal schools in the us--uc berkeley, wesleyan, oberlin, pitzer, you could never have the kind of freedom of expression that is so precious to people here. i can only imagine what would happen at scripps if i put a sign in the humanities courtyard with some quote about the proletariat rebellion. ha it makes me laugh just thinking about it.the building itself looks like it was abandoned for 10-15 years and they decided to use it because it was unoccupied. half the lights dont work, there is water on the floor everywhere, grafitti isnt frowned upon (and is actually pretty interesting)...the classrooms look like they belong in a prison. and ive seen prisons. everything is smoky because everyone is smoking, there were about 60-70 people in a room the size of my living room, professors show up 40 minutes late, which isnt too bad considering classes are usually four hours long (occasionally 3). not quite the scripps country club, to say the least. i was going to take a class on pre-columbian cultures at the private catholic university but there was only one non-exchange student in the class and the professor spent the first 40 minutes describing the process of writing an academic paper ie you start with a thesis and build supporting arguments etc. i had wanted to take a class there at least to compare the experiences but i felt like the only reason i would really take it would be because it was easy and i didnt want to cheat myself like that.

so yes, my classes are going very well but i must admit it is ridiculously hard to focus and get myself to read and study, especially because the weather is getting better. i love knowing my way around the city and feeling like everything is accessible to me. my academic goal i think is just to learn as much as i can and not drag my gpa down too much......

Bariloche

Wow, what a trip. i cant believe i am writing this only now when i came back more than two weeks ago but classes started and its been a little crazy for me. we left BA on a tuesday afternoon, on a big bus that was probably twice as comfortable as a first class seat on a plane. the seats reclined completely, they served tree meals, showed us movies--i slept a full nights sleep and the 20 hours flew by. bariloche itself is in the andes of patagonia and this is just before the end of the peak skiing season. the town was full of tourists--mostly brazilians and argentines but a few from europe and the states as well. i cannot describe to you how beautiful it was, but can only say that seeing that spectacular view literally took my breath away and left me absolutely speechless (crazy!). i will try to go back in the spring as well--those mountains make utah look like kansas.
skiing was fun and its really like riding a bicycle--even though i hadnt done it since i was about six years old i am really getting the hang of it...or was for a while. i was skiing down a slope and just picked up too much speed too fast and could not slow down and flipped over. my skis snapped off and then i slid down the mountain about 10 feet at least--all my stuff was all over and everyone skiing down handed me a different lost object--poles, hat, skis...one boy came and handed me the lenses of my glasses. one of the kids on the trip is a ski bum from colorado, and informed me tha that kind of fall is known as a "yard sale" with all your stuff everywhere, haha. when i fell the wind was knocked completely out of me--it took a second to breathe and i was totally disoriented. when i got up it hurt a little when i breathed so i got down the mountain and went straight to the first aid station, which promptly refused to examine me because i didnt have enough cash and they didnt accept credit cards. what really sucked almost more than anything was that none of the people i was with came or even volunteered to come with me-- i just kept thinking how if any one of them got hurt i wouldnt even t think about continuing to ski. i got lost trying to find the clinic that did accept credit cards and asked a random paramedic to help me and ended up breaking down and crying and suddenly he was ridiculously helpful and kind--got a golf cart to take me like two blocks and was like 'why would your friends keep skiing if youre hurt' and im all good question. it was pretty funny too because i was saying how unnecessary the golf cart was, and he says to me "look, if there was a lot going on here, ots of accidents, we wouldnt do it, but nothing ever happens so its our pleasure." anyway i got to the clinic and the people tehre were so nice and took an xray and no bones were broken, my muscles only got very inflamed but nothing serious at all. i was relieved. after that i went back into town and took the most amazing walk; found this artisans market where i bought beautiful, cheap jewelry and took a million pictures of the lake and mountains. it ended up being a really great afternoon even though the people i was with were disappointingly unhelpful-- in fact, they all had lunch together at the top of the mountain--i couldnt join them because i wouldnt be able to ski back down.
after my lil fall i ended up skiing the remaining two days without any problems, although i did obtain the name Slowpoke McGee, resulting from the fact that neither i nor my companions thought it was physically possible to ski as slowly as i did--but hey, i didnt fall! i just got over the whole not coming with me to the doctor thing because what choice did i have, really, and the truth is that almost all of them are actually really nice people, its just that theyre more the kind of people you have fun with at a club than in a beautiful place. they wanted to drink ALLLLLLLL the time, ie at every meal even when we were skiing all day. one kid had a bottle of whiskey in his backpack while snowboarding and would bust it out on the lifts. blech. needless to say, i was less than disappointed to find out that i had accidentally booked a ticket on a different bus than all of them on the 20 hour bus ride home. fortunately, not everyone stayed at the same place--the original 7 people had rented a condo while the other four of us stayed in the best hostel everrrrrr. it was literally ON the lakeshore and the view during the day was this magnificent lake framed by the most beautiful mountains i have ever seen. the people there were really awesome too, from all over the world, and the best night i had in bariloche was when i went out on my own with some of the people from the hostel. ah so fun! overall, it was hands down worth it, and i dont have any hard feelings about my fall.
what was also cool was that even though i had a great time, i was glad to come back to buenos aires. even more than that, it was such a nice feeling to be back--my neighborhood just felt so comfortable and familiar and i really felt like i was coming back to my own room. i hope you all are well and i have lots more to write about so stay tuned!

Snowbound

Every time I write it´s like I don´t know where to start--it feels like so much happens every day here. Last week I registered for classes, which was a strange process. the way it works here is that you register for any classes youre possibly interested in because once registration is over you can't add courses--you can only drop them. I registered for like 12 classes, but the only two i know for sure i am taking are spanish and this class that is part class and part community service. That class is within the program, but i am really excited about it...Other classes I am looking at are pre-colombian latin america, urban geography(!), latin american social thought, photojournalism....i have no idea what i will end up taking, i just have to see what seems good in the beginning. Unfortunately, I am missing the first class for a few of the classes i registered for at the catholic university...because...i am going skiing in Bariloche! Bariloche is in the mountains in Patagonia--a 20-hour bus ride from buenos aires...yes, twenty. fortunately it is overnight and the seats recline almost completely so i am not too worried about it, though i am sure i will be singing a different tune tomorrow. I just decided today that im going- im kind of tagging along with this group of kids that all go to georgetown, but they are super nice and i am glad. i kind of feel guilty going with such a big group of americans instead of going with fewer people and trying to have a more cultural experience...but what the hell, im going to bariloche! i leave tomorrow afternoon at 2 and will arrive the following morning. we went today to a ski store and for thirty bucks i got waterproof ski gloves and the cheapest pair of ski pants i could find, ie bright red ones that make me look like a fire truck. hey, at least i wont get lost....i am a little nervous about skiing since i havent been since i was maybe seven years old but there are two kids from south florida going that have never skiied before so i am not too worried about being on my own. ah! i cant believe it! i feel so adventurous! this is almost as spontaneous as me and hodi and serena booking tickets to guadalajara the day before and leaving two hours after we booked the tickets...but not quite.
yesterday i went to the most beautiful antiques fair in a neighborhood called san telmo, which is THE tango neighborhood of BA, which believe me says a lot. the fair was so amazing--they had the most crazy, random, beautiful things. each stand for the most part sold one primary thing- one vendor was selling nothing but antique siphon bottles in every color of glass you can imagine, while another sold only chandelier crystals or silver spoons. The neighborhood is great too--still kind of a dive but with incredible architecture and murals and lots of color everywhere. we saw these people that apparently are there every week- it's like twenty or thirty people playing drums of all different sizes and then women were walking in front dancing samba. soooo cool. they walked around the whole neighborhood so you could almost always hear the beat from a distance.
i hope you all are well and i miss you. wish me luck on the slopes!

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Losses and Gains

Needless to say the past few days have been a little loco. i am still here, painting the town red, as is to be expected, with a few lifes lessons under my belt since the last time i wrote. i experienced my first omgiamabroad mini-crisis! Two days ago I was sitting at a restaurant eating lunch with three new friends. the restaurant was nearly empty the entire time we were there. we had a nice meal and are splitting up the check when my friend Luisa turns around to find her bag gone. she had hung it on the back of her chair with her coat over it, three of us were sitting at the table with her, and one man was behind her, and nobody saw it happen. i quickly fell into the role of keeping Luisa calm, we went straight the the bank, where i lent her some money and we spent the rest of the afternoon cancelling her credit cards. she had been carrying around her entire wallet, ipod, us phone...it sucked. I was so glad i had been so vigilant up until that point, carrying only one card on me at a time, guarding my stuff with my life...in the end, though, it was good in that something i was afraid of happening happened (fortunately not to me) and we just dealt with it and moved on. To add insult to injury, though, when i took out money from the atm to give to luisa, i was so focused on getting back to the program center so we could cancel everything that i forgot my atm card in the machine and had to cancel it when i realized what i had done after the bank had closed. obviously. when it rains it pours sometimes.

other than that mishap, everything has been going very smoothly. I have the metro system figured out--buenos aires is an extremely easy place to navigate, most of the streets are on a grid system that makes getting places very simple. other than the 45 minutes it took me this morning to find my way to the university that was two blocks away from where i got off the subte, i have been able to find my way without any trouble. i have been making friends with a few other kids in the program, although i always forget how offbeat my sense of humor can be until i am in a new social situation. next week i will register for classes, for which i cannot wait. there are a million and a half courses i want to take, but i will probably only be able to do three or four. the only two classes i know for sure i am taking right now are intensive spanish, which is required, and a class throught the program that pairs you up with an organization at which you do community service---i cant wait! i told them that i have a lot of experience working with children but i am very open-minded about what i want to do. there is an organization the coordinator was telling me about that is all about womens issues, everything from reproductive health to supporting the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (mothers of those abducted and killed by the military dictatorship of the 70s and 80s, that still have weekly demonstrations in the main downtown plaza). there are also a lot of extracurricular clubs and courses that are not for credit that i might do--maybe tango or photography or basketball...not.

I went tonight with two friends to see a production of Cabaret--i had no idea how much theater they had here! they quality of the prodution was absolutely Broadway--amazing talent, sets, costumes, everything, and the production itself was very well done and interesting. it was so crazy to see it in spanish, though... i cant imagine how hard it would be to translate a musical. i can say that during the money song they just said ¨moneymoneymoney,¨ which certainly has a nicer ring to it than ¨plataplataplata.¨ For the next two weeks there is a something called the Exposición Rural, which i think will be something along the lines of a state fair(!) with animal competitions and lots of vendors from all over the countryside, which should be very fun. Other than that, i am starting to adjust to life here- barely eating breakfast, light lunch around 1, dinner at 10(!) going out at 11 and waking up again at 9. i am suffering hardship, i know. anywho i hope you are all well and i would love to hear from you if you want to drop me a line sometime either by email or if you want to call me it is free for me to recieve calls and my number is

me zsamo zsael

Wow what can I say about my first impression of this marvelous city. It is safe to say that Argentines are pretty much some of the friendliest people on the planet, and believe me when I say that they know how to enjoy being alive. I am in a program for American students studying abroad; there are about 100 to 120 kids in the program from all over the US. I am living in a homestay--ie in someone´s home-- and that someone is a 30-year-old woman named Silvina. I cannot even describe how awesome she is, nor what a perfect match we are. She happens to be Jewish, from a city in the Patagonia region of Argentina, and she has a Sociology degree from the University of Buenos Aires. Her apartment is in a neighborhood called Villa (pronounced here ¨Vee-zsa¨) Crespa, known by some as Villa Creplach because it is primarily Jewish. Ha! The building in which she lives is absolutely amazing. Because it has been a Jewish neighborhood for many years, it used to be a sort of garment district, as that was an industry run primarily by Jews. Her building is actually a converted textile factory, so the apartment is great--High ceilings, lots of space, particularly in the middle of one of the largest cities in South America. The building is very old, so all the paint on the walls of the apartment are peeling, which I think looks cool--makes me feel very Bohemian. She said that she used to paint every year because it never seems to adhere to the walls, but then she decided to take a vacation with the money she would need to paint--peeling paint is a small price to pay for a vacation. It is so amazing because she has exactly the same taste as me--all her furniture is orange and yellow and red and she has prints of klimt and modigliani everywhere--for those of you that don´t know, my room at home is painted orange and I have had pages from a Klimt calendar on my wall at school for the past three years. My room is at least the size of my room at home, if not larger, with an entire wall of closets (painted mustard yellow). The one drawback to the place is that it is very cold--none of the buildings here have central heating, only these small box-looking heaters that attach to the wall and have actual gas flames in side--very fire-safe, I know. Anyway, I hate being cold, so I have taken to just sitting in front of the heater a lot and putting on more layers until I look like the Michelin Man. Fortunately my bed is very warm and the shower is great, so I end up kind moving around a lot between these three sources of heat. Another thing here that is a definite sign of the times is the elevators. Nearly all the elevators here are the kind with two doors--one on the outside and one on the inside that you have to open and close every time you enter or leave them. I love it.
The food is fantastic here. The first night we arrived the program took us out to this restaurant with the most elaborate buffet I have ever seen. Even though I don´t like to eat pork, I wasn´t about to let it stop me from tasting everything I could. I don´t even know half the things I ate, though I must say the cow intestine was a pleasant surprise. Some unpleasant surprises were the blood sausage (clotted cow´s blood in sausage form), which really just tasted like cinnamon but looked as gross as it sounds, and the cow kidney, cut so that the outer layers of the muscle were left on....I honestly think it was the most disgusting thing I have ever eaten, but hey, at least I tried it. I think I could eat empanadas every day for the rest of my life, and the citrus here is fantastic. Last night Silvina heated up schnitzel!! and when I exclaimed ¨schnitzel!¨ she had no idea what I was talking about but said that they eat it all the time here...I think I will still call it schnitzel because hey, that´s what it was. I have yet to choose my classes and therefore have no real rhythm or regular schedule but the orientation has been very helpful in my adjustment. I am already taking the subway (¨subte¨) on my own between my house, the program center, and the rest of the city.
Anyway, I think that has been the past few days in a nutshell. I hope you are all well and enjoying the summer heat up there!
xoxo