Happy leap year! Nothing exciting happened, and every day in Argentina is strange enough to feel like February 29th that I hardly noticed...
For example--registering for classes. WHAT?! You know how it works in the US--classes are ironed out months and months before and you´re registered long before that semester even starts. There´s no guessing and the only thing you really have to worry about is if that class will be offered and if you´ll have to be on the waiting list or not. There are crises every once in a while, but for the most part it runs fairly smoothly. Not so in Argentina.
During my stay here I will be taking 4 classes with international students and 1 class with Argentines. Luckily the classes with international students were all planned and getting those ironed out was simple. But that class with Argentines...wow. In addition to not even having the schedules fully ironed out (with T-2 weeks til classes start...) my adviser didn´t really even give me any useful information on which classes I should take and indicated that I´d have to go to individual departments to talk to people about the classes being offered, as there´s no universal course catalogue or schedule. My first destination was to be the office of Julio Burdman, but was he there? No. Of course not.
Yes, I know this is just one component of culture shock and that nothing is "better" or "worse" in Argentina, it´s just "different", but I felt enraged and confused. In addition to the fact that I was in shock about the fact that classes were still so up in the air, I was frustrated that because there´s not really a unified university, everybody operates independently, meaning they don´t know about other departments or can´t be bothered to know because it´s out of their jurisdiction. This is somewhat true in the US, but if I went to the college of business about a sociology class, they could probably be kind of helpful and tell me where to go instead or even make the call for me. It´s every person for themselves here.
After class, Angela, Gus and I had plans to get our tickets for Bariloche, but they both had advising and I had to find J. Burdman...Luckily he was in his office this time. I approached him about possible classes in his department to take and was disappointed by the selection. Ironically, for being an international studies major, I really don´t like political science or international relations classes--despite how intertwined they are. Obviously, I have to pay attention to IR and poly sci, but I feel like the people actively involved in these subjects are in a perpetual pissing contest of who´s smarter and they lose sight of the real goal, which is how to improve relations and truly understand them. Not only that, but doing poly sci reading in Spanish sounds even more arduous and terrible than it does in English. Regardless, I got his signature, approving my being in the class and started to think, "well, maybe I won´t be taking classes with Argentines..."
My meeting with Mr. Burdman was clearly disappointing and set me up to be grumpy for what was about to happen next. We´d heard that instead of going to Retiro to buy tickets, we could go to a caja in a supermarket and buy tickets there. I´d go anywhere but Retiro for my tickets. Things were going smoothly until we asked about the student discount--which we only got AT RETIRO. ARE YOU TRYING TO KILL ME!? In addition to the fact that I´d already been to Retiro 4 times in the past 7 days, it was already Wednesday, meaning we were cutting it close if we wanted to leave Saturday--hopefully they´d still have tickets tomorrow...
Alright, Retiro, you win. To save $300 pesos, I will return to you. But I hate you. I HATE YOU!!
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