NO HAY

¿Como se va ustedes? I´m doing pretty well I suppose. I´ve just finished all of my classes for the week (although in a couple weeks I´ll have spanish class as well on wednesdays and thursdays), and although I´m not particularly happy about, I suppose the reason I´m not happy about it is cause for happiness: the classes were all pretty cool. Yesterday at 12 I went to my first FLACSO class, which is devoted to argentine dance. Yes, including tango. But we also will be learning about more traditional dances, such as the Gato. This dance is performed in pairs or pairs of pairs, and involves a lot of finger-snapping and moving around in circles. Half of each three-hour period is "teorico," while the other hour and a half is devoted to learning the dances themselves. It was a lot of fun actually, and I think the fact that I´m the only "varon" as well as, I think, the only person without dance experience, will make the class a wonderful exercise in being less self-conscious. So that was terrific.

Then from 5:15-9:15 I took part in my UCA class, Psicopatología del Adulto. This was the class the professor of which did not show up last week, but this week I was not disappointed. Not only did I arrive on time, but I actually talked to people to a fairly satisfactory extent. It didn´t hurt that the professor, a middle-aged, balding, sardonic psychiatrist, gave me and the other exchange students plenty of attention, having each of us introduce ourselves to the class and the like, because it gave me a chance to personalize myself as someone more than the american exchange student who needs you to speak slowly and wonders where he can get the syllabus. The other exchange students were an American girl from GWU who apparently was scared away and didn´t come back after the break, and two brasileros, one of whom was apparently in argentina on a sort of psychoanalytic pilgrimage, and seemed somewhat disappointed (as I was a bit, but not too much) that the class was going to be highly un-psychoanalytic, focusing largely on the DSM and it´s more cognitive and biological empirical underpinnings. I´m just going to confess, I couldn´t help but observe myself feeling slightly superior to this guy, full of somewhat naive fervor. I don´t think it´s good that a felt that way, but it just happens to be so.

So this morning, earlier than would have been ideal, was my first rowing practice. It was pretty good, about as I had convinced myself that I expected. Let me explain that last sentence. Obviously if you had asked me I would have said, in all honesty, that I didn´t think I would be particularly spectacular at rowing. But still, I think sort of unconsiously I kind of had this expectation that I would be. There was no basis for that of course, just wishful thinking. Anyway, so the experience conformed more or less to my verbalized expectations: I´m at more or less the same technical level as before, and my arms have totally atrophied from lack of exercise. But it was still a terrific experience. I felt like I was really starting to find a niche here. And I still got to feel pretty good about myself physically when I was running with the team (I´m the tenth member, by the way). In any case, it´s a beautiful place to row and I´m excited to be able to get exercise and training and be on the team. I could speak more profoundly about the experience, but this is a travelblog, not a...whatever that would make it.

I´m starting to feel again like I´ve been writing for an excessively long time, so I´ll just say of my Nuevo Cine Argentino class: The professor seems great, there are lots of interesting readings, and the movies we sampled today seemed quite intriguing and enjoyable. So that can´t but turn out to be a marvelous experience as well.

Not that I don´t miss home, of course. One trivial thing that I miss is american-style cups of coffee. All the coffee here comes in small amounts, extra strong. More like espresso-shots than coffee, really. I just would like my coffee-drinking experience to last a little bit longer, that´s all.

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