news from Buenos Aires part 2 - la UBA

Now I wanna tell you my experience with the UBA. Unfortunately I found out that my courses are not being held at my faculty but in another place pretty far away from where I live (it takes me about an hour to get there from where I live now). The building is even more dirty than the other building, a lot of waste on the ground, broken windows, shabby tables and so on... A few days ago I was sitting in a classroom with a lot of broken windows so that the wind could come through. We were all sitting with a warm sweatshirt and winter jackets and were still freezing... Well, I would say - different country - different conditions to cope with :-)
(You can see pics here).
I will participate in three courses which are called the following: "Taller de informática, telemática y de datos" (something like "Medieninformatik"), "Diseno gráfico" (graphic design) and "mujeres populares de la re/construcción de la nación argentina" (popular women of the re/construction of the Nation Argentina). Being a foreigner means you're "only" allowed to take 3 courses. But all Argentinian students I talked to have been chosing the same amount. They're not allowed to take more than 4, so that's not that a big difference. The courses themselves are splitted into two parts: one is a course "teorética" ("Vorlesung"), the other one is called "práctica" (with less people, like a "Seminar"). Both together are 4 hours, so I have 12 hours of studies in total. Many of the foreign students I met are taking less courses because they're pretty expensive. For Argentinians they're for free, but foreigners have to pay (this is only true for my faculty) 1200 pesos for one course plus 450 pesos for the immatriculation, so totally I paid 4050 pesos (900 Euro) from my own pocket. I'm hoping that "Auslandsbafög" will pay this for me but I still need to send them prove of my immatriculation which I don't have yet because here in Argentina everything just takes a lot longer than expected... To be honest I feel extremely happy lately if something really works out the way it was supposed to work out! No lie! It's like a miracle here :-)
Well, now I'm gonna tell you something of the courses. I will have college every Tuesday and Wednesday evening (from 15-21 o'clock) and Thursday morning from 9-13 o'clock. All courses are offered a lot of times during the week, the time span is between 9-23 o'clock! Seriously! Especially the theoretical classes are in the evening, especially for those students that work. And here are A LOT of students that work fulltime until 7 or 8 pm and go to college after. This is why you see a lot of man and women in working dress at the college.
Now a word to the language:
Of course I don't understand a word! Okay, it's not that bad, I would say I understood 20% of what the profs are trying to tell me. It's terrible. But I was prepared for that experience. What can I expect? It's a little sad, yes, after almost 8 years of trying to learn Spanish having this bad experience but hey - the Argentinian accent is very hard and I was very released when I heard that many other students had the same problem of understanding than me. I hope this will better very soon otherwise I will have a BIG problem. So far I can tell that most of my Argentinian study mates are very nice, most of them are positively surprised when I tell them that I'm from Germany. The funny thing is that many Argentinians are asking me, what the hell I'm doing in Argentina when I'm from Germany where I've got everything I need! For them it seems to be a crazy thing to do. In almost every course I seem to be the only foreigner, but in one course there are a lot of people from the United States. The courses are not very simular to German colleges I would say. Well, a powerpoint presentation, which is totally normal in at the college in Augsburg, here is a miracle. I only have one professor that's using powerpoint. So the professors tell us a story 2 hours and its on our turn to write everything down we find important to keep. We also have to read a lot. Every week we have to read about 100-200 pages for one course, so I really should get started to read... (at the moment I feel like I'm reading the amount of the whole KW-Eilders Vorlesung Reader of "Einführung in die KW" or "Medienwirkung" in only one week and it's all in Spanish so I need more time to understand! help!).
One thing more to mention I think is that I got the impression that both professors and students are more active and ambitious in discussing. Especially the professors are very motivated here.
Today also my Spanish class started. Actually I wanted to take courses at the so-called "laboratoria de idiomas" of the UBA, which is THE center of learning languages in Buenos Aires. But last week was the inscription and the test of level which I wanted to take part in. The test of the level of spanish started on monday at 9 o'clock so we thought it's good enough to be there at 10. Unfortunately the places for the test only were full and so I had to take the test the day after. By then most of the classes have been closed already (because they're have been full, many students already signed up for those courses) so I was only offered one course which I couln't accept because I have another class at the same time at the UBA. So I decided to ask my faculty (they offer language courses, too) if I could join them. That was not a problem at all so I had my first class today. I will have 4 hours of Spanish each week, we're only 3 Germans and one teacher, so that's great.
So, that's for now, next time I will tell you something why I will move out, why I will probably not return to "la boca" (district of Buenos Aires) and how my first "asado" (barbecue) with a lot of Argeninians was :-)
Un beso!