Matt - April

I’m still on my spring break right now (I get a month off), and I’ve spent the last two weeks studying and writing an essay – it sounds pretty boring, but classes started to get difficult so I had to study. Over spring break I went on a trip with four friends I met here from Austrailia. We toured around Italy (Sardinia, Pisa, Florence, Milan), and then made our way up to Amsterdam. All of the places we visited were very cool except for Milan – the main reason we were going to go there was to see the original Last Supper painting but you have to book your reservation like a month in advance. After that the family came over and we went over to Ireland and toured around England a little. It was nice being able to stay in hotels with hot showers and have good meals for that short time period.

The thing that surprised me the most about the University of Essex, where I’m at, is the number of foreign people here. I was originally expecting to meet almost all English people, but they’re almost the minority here. I’ve met the coolest people from all over the world (Nigeria, Greece, Senegal, Russia, France, Norway, China, Lithuania, Turkey….the list goes on), and they’ve really helped me to appreciate all of the different cultures.

Classes here started out slow, but they picked up rather quickly. All I have coming up now is final exams, but these finals basically determine 100% of my grades. It’s pretty tough too, because the teachers I have don’t really lay out what you need to know like they do in the US. Instead it’s up to you to go through the textbooks and find all of the important points, etc. The weekdays here are basically treated like the weekends – it’s hard to distinguish between the two. A lot of people in my flat party very hard and at first it was hard to get used to. I was shocked when I first got there and people were going out to the bars on Sunday and Monday nights. Being over here has really helped me learn to stay focused.

The food hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting it to be, but the prices are. I make my own food so it’s just like the food I had to make back at EC, except I’ve acquired some new recipes from some of my flatmates. The currency exchange here is ridiculous, but no need to state the obvious. When I first got here I was devastated by the prices, but now I’ve grown numb to the fact that a cup of coffee will cost me $9.

Becky - April

Well I'm starting to get oriented here in Buenos Aires after my first month and a half. I can successfully take the subway anywhere I want, though the bus system hasn't been quite as easy to figure out. Classes have FINALLY started rolling...sort of. I had my first week of classes, where I was still just trying different ones out to decide which I would actually take. The week after that we had off! Well, technically only 3 days, but to take the other two days only meant missing one class, so I grasped the opportunity and went travelling through Patagonia. This week, I missed two more classes. The first class was cancelled on account of massive protests because a teacher was killed by police trying to break up another protest somewhere else in the country. On Tuesday, two of my friends and I searched for our class for about an hour before giving up. They changed rooms without telling us, or apparently even the secretary of that school. Classes have been interesting, though. My favorite, by far, is a seminar on Argentine "ideas and political processes." Art should be interesting. Linguistics will be boring because the teacher sits at his desk and mostly stares at that desk as if he were reading a script (though he's definitely not). He then switches between his two pairs of glasses depending on whether he happens to get up to write something on the board or if he is answering a question, etc. Fridays are my hardest because I have back to back fourth year classes, starting at 8am. My Ethnology teacher is hard to understand and asks me 10 times a day whether I understand her. I'm the only international student in the class, which is scary. But today, 2 new Argentine friends offered to help me with whatever questions I may have. 1 brought me to the photocopy place that sells the syllabus. Yes, you read that correctly, we have to buy the syllabus. The problem isn't paying for it, its figuring out which place has which classes. Anyways, my last class is Folklore, and the teacher for that is a sweetheart. When she met me she gave me a kiss on the cheek; she gets very excited about having/meeting international students.

Travelling last week was amazing. I went with two friends that I met here from the US, Ben and Mona. The first city we went to was Bariloche, on the western border with Chile. There we went on a day long guided trip, hiking through the mountains and seeing waterfalls. It was absolutely gorgeous. El Bolson is a strange little hippie town where our hostel was in the middle of nowhere. We thought we were being abducted when the cab driver turned down a gravel road with nothing in sight. Here we went horseback riding, also through the mountains. On the ride, I got to pick fresh blackberries whenever my horse, Rosilla, let me. Finally, in our last stop at Puerto Madryn, we took a bus down to Punta Tombo where we walked among penguins. It was great!

The weekend before all of this, I went with a group of 7 to the beach at Mar del Plata. Here I got to experience more of Argentine nightlife, which doesn't start until at least 1am and usually goes until maybe 7am. The lightweights that we are, we usually got back to the hostel around 4. Its hard to describe my experiences at Mar del Plata; everything was just so surreal. 8 year olds out on the street at 2am, costumes, heart shaped disco balls, a computer lab inside of a restaurant, animal-like dancing... And when we got back on Sunday night, it rained and the streets flooded for an hour or so. It was up to our ankles inside the restaurant.

So, all in all, things are going well. I'm meeting lots of people, getting through some of the not-so-easy things, and actually having fun. I may even be starting to like one or two Argentine foods, though I usually only have a couple options to choose from being vegetarian.

How to Post

First I hope all students are enjoying their adventures abroad! I know we all enjoy reading about them. To post to this site, please type out your entry in a Word document or in your email and send it directly to me at: jennifers@elmhurst.edu. Your post will be reviewed for content and then posted to the site under your first name and the month.
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Shannon - April

Hello to everyone at EC! My name is Shannon and I’m studying abroad in France this semester. I happened to look at the blog site and I saw most of the others who are studying abroad are exactly like me and haven’t written anything, so I thought I’d take up my responsibilities, even if a little late, and give a some input.

I’ve been taking classes since January at the University here, more specifically and the Fac de Lettres, a specific department in the school. And actually, I’m almost done with my classes, only one more week, except for one exam the first part of May. That means it’s a bit stressful as I have quite a few projects and essays to finish up. Figuring out my classes and dealing with the French university system has definitely been the most difficult part of the experience. I think in the first weeks I spent more time looking at the schedules and trying to go to classes than I actually spent in class. There was a hallway full of bulletin boards of classes and times, and it took me two weeks to realize that certain classes had to be paired together. The French university system in general is more unorganized, or at least from my perspective. It could be because I’m not in a degree program where I would have no choice of what classes I take. But, I went to several classes where the professor didn’t show up or there was no one in the room where the class was supposed to be, or one time there were about 4 times as many students as seats. In spite of all that I enjoy most of my classes. At first it was a challenge speaking and thinking in French all the time, but that got better with time.

One of the coolest parts of living here is all the people I’ve met from all over the world. There are so many international students, I love the mix of cultures and different experiences. In Besançon there’s a special language center for foreign students to learn French, which attracts mostly non-European students, from Asia, Africa and America. Then there are ERASMUS students who study at the university, and other Americans on the ISEP program.

In recent news, round one of the French presidential elections is coming up at the end of April, with the second round to follow in early May. France might see its first woman president, Ségolène Royal is in the top two in the polls. Three of the candidates (the 3 major ones) will have been to Besançon at the end of this week. Nicolas Sarkozy was here about a month ago and Royal and François Bayrou are speaking this week, I might be going to see one of them. It’s cool that I get to be here at a time like this, but it also leads to questions or comments about American politics, more specifically about how much the French detest our president. I admit that I don’t really follow politics so it’s rather embarrassing when a French person corrects you about your own country’s government.

There’s so much to tell about classes, traveling in Europe, living in France and doing everyday things like going to the grocery store, the post office, setting up a bank account, buying a cell phone, etc. that I’m going to let you ask the questions and then I’ll be more thorough in my replies. So, shoot and I’ll try my best to give helpful answers.