Another Week

I can't believe another week has already gone by. After getting back from Tierra del Fuego last week, I definitely took some time to catch up with some homework and reading. Last Tuesday was a feriado, or holiday. Although I spent most of the day doing some reading for my classes, I did venture out to the Plaza del Mayo to watch the protests that Buenos Aires is so known for. It was muy lively. 

The rest of the week was pretty normal. My classes are going smoothly and I'm starting to get used to everything in the Argentine culture. 

On Saturday, I watched the Argentine national soccer team in their World Cup qualifying game versus Venezuela. Argentina won 4-0 and it was fun to watch the game. I wasn't able to get tickets to watch it live though. Some people in our program waited in line from 230 am to 930 am to get tickets, but they said that the game was a lot of fun.

On Sunday, I went to a feria, fair, in San Telmo. Sundays are so quiet in the city. Most of the businesses are shut down, and the public transportation is very empty. It feels very strange, but also very relaxing. It was my first Sunday in the city in almost a month and it was a nice way to relax and take in parts of the city. I've also found a route to run through the parks here which is lovely now that the weather is slowly beginning to cool.

Tomorrow, I'm going to head off to Mendoza, the wine country. I'm excited to travel again in Argentina. I'll be leaving on Wednesday night, because Thursday is another holiday, and then returning sometime on Sunday. It should be a great trip! I'll blog again when I return.

Back from the End of the World

On Thursday afternoon, after my class at UCA, my friends and I headed out to the Airport so that we could take a flight to Ushuaia which is the capital of Tierra del Fuego. During the flight, we stopped once to drop some of the passengers off, but we were in the middle of nowhere. On the last half of the flight, there was an amazing sunset. It must have lasted for two hours in total. 

Once we got off the plane, the first very clear difference was the drop in temperature. In Buenos Aires, it's usually in the 80s with humidity. In Tierra del Fuego, the temperatures were in the forties to low fifties with tons of wind. We took a quick cab to the hostel, which was incredibly clean. The next morning, we headed up to the National Park. Normal entry fee is 50 pesos, but with a student id, it was only four pesos. There were four possible trails that we could hike, and we choose the one that was by the Beagle Channel. The views were amazing. Along the way, we passed by horses and rabbits. The trail was supposed to take about 3 hours, but because we took tons of pictures and stopped to eat lunch, it took us about five hours. When we had reached the end of the trail, we saw two rainbows. The weather at Tierra del Fuego was a bit strange. It was always sunny, event though it was a bit cold until late afternoon, when clouds would roll in and it would rain for a few hours. 

That night, we headed to bed pretty early because the next day we planned to take a boat out to an island of penguins. We had not realized, however, that first there would be an hour and a half bus ride to the boat. It was well worth it though. When we finally arrived to the island, we saw hundreds of penguins in their natural habitat. Our tour guide, Anna, told us about the migration path of the penguins. Apparently, we had arrived just in time to see them because in a few weeks they will be returning to the South pole for the winter. I took lots of pictures of the penguins and had a great experience there. 

The next day, we headed out on a 10am boat across the Channel. First, we visited islands with seals. Then we passed the lighthouse. We visited a few other islands, but we finally disembarked on one of them and climbed up a hill. From the summit, we had a great view of the city of Ushuaia and the other islands. It was an incredible sight. 

Finally, that night we headed back to Buenos Aires. It had been an incredible experience. I had never seen such fantastic landscapes and been so close to so much wildlife. I'm glad that I had this chance to get to travel to the End of the World.

Today, Tuesday, is actually a holiday in Buenos Aires. It is called el Dia Nacional de la Memoria por la Verdad y Justicia. So, I don't have classes, but I'll probably head down to Plaza de Mayo to see how the citizens commemorate this day. 

Finally, although I've been posting some pictures here, this is a link to my picasa site. Just copy the line below this paragraph into the address bar of your web browser and you'll be able to see my pictures! Because it's so hard to post a lot of pictures to the blog, I've been uploading pictures to this site. I only have about fifty up from the End of the World Trip so far because it takes a lot of time to load, but I should be posting more soon.

http://picasaweb.google.com/ej.jones06/

Quick Post

Hey All,

This week has been really exciting! I finally had a week with all of my classes. My class at the Universidad de Buenos Aires seems awesome. It's called Transicion, Crisis, y Reforma and it's all about the transitions in Latin America during the past years. The building and classrooms of UBA are so interesting. There's tons of graffiti and posters on the walls, and the buildings seem really beat up. But the education is the best in Argentina and it's free for Argentines. Most of the students work part-time/full-time and attend classes later in the days, which means they're really committed to the work. The professor seemed really knowledgeable about the subject and I've heard great things. Also, there are three other students from FLACSO in the class, so it was a relief to know other people in the class, though I do hope to meet some of the portenos in the class as well. 

On Monday, I was really tired from the weekend, but I was talking to some students in the program and we decided to travel to Tierra del Fuego (aka Land of Fire, aka The End of the World). It's the southernmost city in the world and with any luck I'll see glaciers and penguins! The temperature there should be in the forties, low fifties, which is a lot higher than I anticipated, especially coming from a cold Massachusetts winter. But it should be a lot of fun, and i'm gonna take tons of pictures!

Finally, today when I was going to my class at the Universidad Catolica Argentina and during some other points of the day, I took some pictures of the university, the statues in the Plaza de Mayo, the view from my street, and some pictures of my apartment building. Hopefully, you all will enjoy this little slideshow!

Quick Trip to Uruguay

Hey Everybody,

I´m back. Last week, I started most of my classes which were pretty interesting. Finding the classes is also turning out to be quite a challenge. In total, I´m taking five classes, three of which are located in FLACSO headquarters, which is really close to my house.
I´m also taking two direct enrollment classes in the universities here. This is called the Shopping period, which is a period in which we attend classes to see if we like them or not. I´ve attended three classes, one of which I´ll choose for one of the two spots and I´m pretty sure which class I´m going to be taking for my last class.
However, getting to these classes and finding the rooms is proving to be challenging. First, it takes about forty minutes to get to the Universidad Catolica Argentina here in Buenos Aires. After arriving at the university, trying to find where the listings are of classrooms for each class took another good hour at the university. Finally, some professors show up around thirty minutes late for class or change classrooms at the last minute. Actually particpating in the class and understanding the Spanish has been the easy part.

This weekend, I headed off to Uruguay with my friend Kelsey from Georgetown. On Thursday, we boarded a Buquebus ferry from the Puerto Madero here in Buenos Aires that took us across the Rio de la Plata to Uruguay. We hopped on a bus to the capital, Montevideo. That night we went to the Pony Pisador, which was a small bar in the middle of the capital, right near our hostel. The next morning, we headed to all the sites in the capital, from the plaza to the theatres, to the Rambla (which overlooks the sea), to multiple musuems, one of which was about the history of Uruguay, the other was called the Museum of the Cowboy (Gaucho) and the Moneda (Coin). It was a random pairing, but pretty informative. Finally, we headed to the docks of the city, where there was a bazaar-type of event.
Finally, we headed back to the bus station, Tres Cruces, where we jumped on a bus to Punto del Este. When we arrived, we checked into our hostel and met up with other kids in the program. The next day, we headed to the beach. It was a really nice day until around seven when a storm moved in, so we packed up from the beach and headed to get some dinner.
The next morning Kelsey and I headed off to Colonia, which is a touristy town in Uruguay, right across the river from Buenos Aires. We visited the lighthouse there, a few plazas, and the oldest church in Uruguay. The architecture was incredible and the cobblestone streets were really cool. Finally, we took the ferry back to Buenos Aires and I headed to bed.

In Uruguay one of the craziest things was the money. In Argentina, 3.6 pesos is equivalent to 1 dollar US. In Uruguay, 24 Uruguayan pesos are equivalent to 1 dollar US. With this exchange rate, it was so hard to figure out what the real prices were! But I can´t imagine figuring out this rate frequently!

Hope things are well back home! And thanks for the comments everybody! It´s really nice to hear from you! I´ll post pictures from the trip later this week!

Update: Heres a slideshow of the pics:

Mar del Plata

Hey Everybody,

Hope everyone had a great weekend. Mine was a lot of fun, and really relaxing.

On Friday, we had orientation and registration for classes at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. It went really well and I hopefully will get into this class here that I really want to take.

After picking classes, I went back home to pick up my packed bag for my trip to Mar del Plata ( which translates to Sea of Money/Sea of Silver). Our bus was at 4:30. In total, 12 of us kids from FLACSO planned to head down that afternoon from Buenos Aires and arrive around, nine or ten that night. Unfortunately, the other half of the FLACSO students, who hadn't been in my group at Immigrations on Thursday, had to go to Immigrations (which I talked about in my last blog post) on Friday. And then, the computers crashed at Immigrations, so the students who went on Friday had to stick around till 6:30 there and about seven kids who were planning on going to Mar del Plata, missed their original bus. So, five of us headed down to the beach at 4:30 (the other group who had come from Immigrations were coming at midnight). The bus was great; although it was five hours long, it really didn't feel like it was that long and there was plenty of room on the bus.

We arrived at Mar del Plata around 10 and headed to our hostel, which was pretty good- there were eight beds in the room. We headed out to grab some dinner and then headed to bed soon after that. 

That night and early the next morning, the weather wasn't that great- it was raining and there had been a storm. We ate some brunch around noon, and the weather cleared! We headed down to the beach and met up with the students who had arrived early that morning on the second bus. The water was incredible! The waves were really great, especially compared to any waves I had seen in Massachusetts and the water was warmer than Cape Cod. Everyone from Buenos Aires had talked about how cold the water was, but I thought it was really refreshing. I got a bit of a sunburn, but I used a lot of sunblock so it could have been much worse.

For dinner that night, we headed to a local grocery store and bought some ingredients to make some sandwiches. We headed down to the beach and had a nice, relaxing dinner on the beach watching the sun set. 

This morning, we woke up pretty early so that we could head to the beach one more time! before we had to leave. It was a great day and it was awesome to get a few more hours in at the beach. We headed back to BA on a 3 o'clock bus and I was back home by 10. Today, I think was Daylight Savings in the US, so now I'm only two hours away from the Eastern time zone, as opposed to three. Also, I think next weekend is Daylight savings time in Argentina, so we'll "fall back" here and with that switch, Buenos Aires time will only be one hour different from the Eastern Coast. 

Below are some pictures from the beach!

Week Two

Today I realized that I have been in Buenos Aires for a very busy, but very exciting two weeks.

On Monday afternoon, we had the opportunity to meet with the coordinators of FLACSO about any questions that we had regarding courses. It was really informative and helpful in trying to figure out which classes to take. We are in "shopping" period for choosing classes- which basically entails enrolling in many classes and then spending a few weeks figuring out which ones we want to take and which ones we want to drop. 

Later that night, I had my first class at the Universidad Catolica Argentina. It was a class on Game Theory. Though the subject material looked somewhat interesting, there were only five other students in the class. I think I'm gonna drop the class because there are other Economics classes here that I would want to take. In particular, there is a class on World Economic History that I attended yesterday morning. The class looked very interesting and I could understand the professor pretty well, which was a definite plus.

On Tuesday, we had a "dia cultural," which was essentially a day of icebreakers at a park here in Argentina. It was a nice way to bond with the other students in FLACSO, but overall it was difficult to really focus on these activities in the midst of the other really important events of this week, i.e. going to our first classes and picking classes at other universities.

Wednesday was essentially the day on which I organized my ideal schedule, which hopefully will become a reality. In it, I take two Spanish Language classes (which are only two credits each), a three-credit class at FLACSO called the Economic Development of Argentina in the context of Latin America, a World Economic History class at UCA, and finally a class on Argentine government at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. 

I went to bed very early by Argentine standards last night, 11 PM, as I had to wake up before six this morning so that I could arrive at the Immigration Center here in Buenos Aires. Technically, when I arrived in Buenos Aires, as with all the members of my program, I was given a 90-day tourist visa. However, in order to study at the universities here, I have to get a longer student-visa, which grants me residency in Argentina. I arrived at the center at 7 and saw I huge line of people waiting to enter the building. After meeting up with our coordinators and the rest of our group, we entered and sat to wait. I was given a number (101) which basically assured that I would be waiting for quite a while. Finally, at about 12:30, after waiting for most of the morning, I submitted all of my paperwork, thinking that would be the end of the process. However, I still to stick around for about another hour for the officials to deliver the results of the process to our program's coordinators. It was a long, boring morning, but because I finished by two, I still was able to have most of the day free. Also, it was a great chance to meet other kids in the program who I hadn't met yet. Now, I'm pretty tired though.

This weekend, I'm planning on going to Mar del Plata, which is a great beach town. A couple of friends and I are going to take a bus there on Friday and return sometime on Sunday. Hope everybody has a great weekend!

PS. no pictures of the Immigration Center. trust me- they wouldn't be worth it. haha.