Settling in

My first two weeks in Buenos Aires went by way too fast. And still it seems like I have been here for an eternity already.

When I got to the airport, a private car service picked me up and dropped me off at the university, where I met Hyun Ah. She works for FrontDesk, an organization in the university that is taking care of a bunch of us exchange students. I booked my housing with them so they still needed to give me my contract and keys to the apartment. After that, Hyun Ah brought me to the apartment, which is about four blocks from the university – very nice.

I live in Belgrano, one of the nicest, richest and safest parts of Buenos Aires. The German Embassy is just down the road from where I live and so is Palermo Park, a beautiful park with a couple of lakes and nice paths to go for walks.

In the apartment I met my 6 roommates: Karen, Yahaira and Edgard from Mexico, Murray from Mississippi, USA, Larissa from Switzerland and Nicolas, half French, half Texan. Until now we all get along very well, have a lot of fun and share lots of laughs and wine. Wine here is very good and not very expensive, so sometimes it seems like we drink more wine than water... I have finally discovered my love for red wine here.

The FrontDesk people, Hyun Ah and Alfredo, live in the apartment next to ours and provide breakfast for us every morning, which is really great. They also love to bake! We already got our first homemade almond cake and they let us try some Macarons (which they promise to make A LOT while we are here).

On my first Monday here, July 20^th, we had Orientation Day where we met all the other exchange students (there are about 280 at the University, from all over the world) and received a load of information about the University, the city, problems that might occur and how to handle them, how to receive a student visa and a lot more.

During the orientation I met Corinna, a girl that goes to my university in Germany. Since she doesn’t study business, she goes to another part of my university, which is in a different town, so we haven’t met before. Here we also don’t have any classes together but we’ll probably still see each other quite a bit.

The rest of the first week nothing really happed in terms of university. Each student had an appointment with an assigned advisor to figure out the schedules and everyone had to go and get their ID card for the university. Other than in my home university, here we have to attend class and need to swipe our ID cards to prove that we were really there.

The rest of the time we took some trips to see more of the city and I finally met Randy.

Last week was a lot more interesting - classes started!

As exchange students we have different options here: we can either take PALAS classes, which are classes in English, PEAL classes, which are the same classes but in Spanish and the professors are prepared to teach only exchange students, or we can take the regular faculty classes. PALAS and PEAL classes are offered only to us exchange students. I had decided to take 3 PALAS classes and 2  faculty classes.

I was pretty excited about my classes and my schedule but it only took me until day two to figure out, that this wasn’t going to work. The PALAS classes were good! But the first faculty class showed me the harsh reality about my Spanish – I would not be able to listen and take notes at the same time. And it pretty much looked like we had to write down everything by ourselves without getting a handout.

So I decided to change these two classes in my schedule and ended up changing it a couple of times until I only had one of my original classes left and 5 new ones. 3 PALAS classes and 3 PEAL classes - we’ll see how that works. Luckily my professors at home approved the classes very fast so I can finalize my schedule now.

The classes I attend now are:

-       International Business in the Southern Cone (English)

-       Política Económica Argentina (Spanish)

-       Economical Integration in Latin America (English)

-       Estudios Culturales (Spanish)

-       America Latina y Economia Global (Spanish)

-       Social Economy (English)

The last one might already be my favorite class – we’ll talk about NGOs, how they work and the difference in managing different kinds of businesses and social businesses. I attended that class for the first time yesterday and we had visitors from TECHO, a Latin American NGO, who told us about their work and who are looking for new volunteers…

Since I have every class twice a week, my schedule is a little full but I still have Fridays off, which gives me time to go on some weekend trips. I will tell you about these when I get there.

Next week is going to be another week for us exchange students to figure out our schedules but by Friday we need to confirm them and then we can’t make any more changes. After that, the introduction phase will be over and the classes will really start.

Other than that I am doing really well here! I enjoy the new people and the new surroundings a lot and I already really like Buenos Aires. Can’t wait to get to know more of this city and the whole country in the next couple of months! The weather is all right so far, just a little cold. But it’ll get warmer soon, I hope.

I think that is it for the moment.