Shopping Week

    My program while abroad, IFSA, lets us spend the first two weeks of classes "shopping" for what we want to take at the local universities. This allows us to try out a bunch of different classes and then decide which ones are right for us. This is such a helpful tool as an international student because some of the professors are much harder to understand, and I think I underestimated how hard some classes would be.
    In Mendoza, we can either take classes at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, or at Universidad de Congresso. Cuyo is a public university, and Congresso is a private university. However, the system for public vs. private schools is the complete opposite than in the States. Here, attending public universities is free, which means that a lot more teenagers want to go to college after graduating their escuela secondaria (high school). This makes it a very competitive process to get into the public universities, and the ones who are not accepted have to pay to go to college at the private universities. As a result of this process, the public universities are actually the more prestigious schools, with better professors and better reputations. The classes are much larger; some have a couple hundred students. Cuyo has 39,000 students, and University of Buenos Aires, also a public university, has 310,000 students attending, whereas Congresso only has 2,000 students and the classes are much smaller. There are benefits to each type of university though. To me, Congresso seems much more organized and inclusive because there are fewer students.
    My first class of the week was Historia de Espana and it was a fifth year class in the history department. I'm not going back. I understood probably 20% of the class, and even though the professor said she was speaking slowly for me and the other 2 intercambios in the class, we still didn't follow much. I was much more relieved when I went to my second class on Tuesday, Modern History, and the professor was much more willing to help out the foreign exchange students. She is going to allow us to retake tests if necessary, do more written work instead of oral, have time for us to ask questions in her office, and she said as long as she knows we are trying, she will give us credit. Another class I'm taking, that is with my IFSA program, is about the underdevelopment of countries in this region, which I am excited to learn about because there are many very prominent differences between Argentina's and the US's level of development and industrialization and I'm interested to learn more about why.
    I had my first homework assignments this week, which involved a lot of Google Translating. It helps that my modern history class is about topics I am familiar with already, like feudal systems and religion in society, so I at least have the background knowledge when trying to understand the lecture in Spanish. However, in my readings, there are a lot of words I don't even know in English, especially words pertaining to religion, so I'm doing a two step process of translating and using the dictionary to figure out what my homework says.
    Tango class is also offered during the semester, and I haven't decided yet if I'm going to take it or not. I don't have much dancing skills so maybe this is a great opportunity to learn. The last class I'm taking is a Música Popular Latinoamericana, which is about popular music in South America, starting with Brazil. We learned all about the instrument and different types of music. This class is two hours, once a week, and it started late and ended early, and over half of it was spent listening to music. The professor and students were sharing mate during class, and he repeated himself quite a few times. I'm not normally the kind of person to take the easy way out, but I'm guilty of that in this situation.
    A couple things I've noticed during classes: PowerPoints are used here a lot in classes, and my first couple teachers really struggled with using it and the other technology in the classroom, like the projectors. They've had to ask the students for help to work it properly. I've also seen professors ask the students for white board markers, which is interesting because I wouldn't normally carry that kind of supplies around. I miss a lot of details in class, so I try to take good notes. I didn't catch when my teacher told us that all of the PowerPoints were online, so for the first two classes I was frantically taking notes trying not to miss anything.  It is also common for two or three professors to teach one class. They assign different homework and I haven't quite figured out how this works yet. Food and drinks are not acceptable in class here, but it is okay to be late and walk in and out. I haven't been able to read my professor's writing very well, so I keep having to ask her to repeat herself, and when I needed to send her an email but couldn't read the email address she wrote down for me, I had to send  it to various combinations of what I thought she wrote down until it successfully sent. 
    The most confusing part about classes is the photocopy system that they use instead of textbooks. I've spent a lot of time waiting in line at the fotocopiador in my facultad, and today I bought a 118 page photocopy of an entire book for 4 dollars. I don't understand how this doesn't infringe on copyrights.
    I'm really excited to finally have a normal schedule and daily routine now that classes are starting. I will feel more like I live here rather than I'm on vacation. I'm also excited to start meeting local students in my classes. I'm going to need their help studying.