Horseback riding in Argentina!

Horseback riding at the gaucho ranch was possibly one of the most frightening/amazing experiences of my life! I thought that with the horses, my language barrier would be non-existent. I was wrong. Apparently, horses in Argentina only know Spanish. And, despite my desperate pleas for the horse to slow, he wasn't listening to one word of it. Finally, one of the gauchos (Argentine cowboy) took pity on me, rode alongside me, and took the reins. My hero!

In addition to my equestrian adventurism, I had a new culinary adventure today as well. I tried blood sausage...one word, gross. Luckily, the rest of the meat the gauchos served was very delicious. All in all, today was lots of adventure!

Tabitha's First Four Days in Argentina

Hi everyone sorry it took me awhile to get this blog up and running! But here it is and I hope you enjoy it :)

I arrived in Buenos Aires on Saturday morning after a long 10-hour flight. I was pretty groggy when we arrived because, as you can imagine, spending the night in an airplane seat is not the most fun or comfortable experience. I had been under the impression that the seats on an overnight international flight would be bigger, have more room, or be at least a little more comfortable. I was very wrong. They are exactly the same.

Aside from the grogginess leftover from spending the night on airplane, our first day was pretty fun. We successfully exchanged money and made it through customs and baggage claim with no problems and were picked up by our program leader. We piled into a bus and headed to the Fundacion Ortega y Gassett, the school we are studying at for the next month, for a brief orientation. When we arrived at the school, we realized very quickly that, unlike any school I have ever seen in the United States, it was located inside a shopping center. The school was only one part of a building that housed a food court, various shops, several art galleries, and a tango studio.

After our orientation at the school, our host families began arrivng to pick us up and take us to our new homes. My roommate Whitney and I were really anxious to meet our host family and were extremely nervous about speaking Spanish to them. Once our host mom Graciela arrived, however, we were excited to get to know her and her dog Isis. She has two grown children and three grandchildren, none of which live at her house, and a sister who eats dinner with us every night. Another student from Minnesota is also temporarily living with her. Graciela's home is a quaint apartment with a combined living and dining room, a kitchen and small laundry room, one bathroom, and three bedrooms. Whitney and I share a room and Jana, the student from Minnesota, has her own room in the back of the apartment. Jana has been in Buenos Aires for about 3 weeks before our group arrived and she will be staying a week longer than us. She speaks Spanish very well and will be going to Peru for the remainder of the summer after leaving Argentina.

Our first night in Argentina was very exciting and we were happy to try empanadas, a common Argentine meal, for dinner. I also tried fernet at dinner, which is a liquor that you mix with Coke. When Graciela was explaining what it was, however, I thought she was saying that it was similar to Coke, which made me think it was some Argentine soda equivalent to Coke. So since I thought it was just soda, I started filling my glass and got it about 1/3 full before I realized everyone was telling me to stop. As Graciela began mixing Coke with my excessive amount of liquor, I realized my mistake and just began laughing. Needless to say, I slowly sipped my way through a very strong drink. And no, parents, I didn't get drunk.

On Sunday, we had a walking tour of the city with our UTD group and learned how to use the subte (subway) and explored a couple of the pedestrian streets located in Buenos Aires. We also visited La Casa Rosada (The Pink House) that is the Argentina equivalent to the White House. The only difference is that the Argentine president doesn't live there. Sunday night Whitney and I went to an heladeria (ice cream shop) near our house and are now afraid we might be tempted to go there every night until we have tried all of the flavors.

Our first day of classes on Monday began at 8:45 AM with our spanish course and ended at 5 after our Argentine culture course with an hour break in between. We heard a lecture on Argentine political history and went on a bus tour of the city for our first day of culture class. The lecture was really interesting and focused on the military dictatorship Argentina suffered from 1976-1983 called The Dirty War. An estimated 30,000 people were kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the government during this time for being suspected of liberal ideas. Intellectuals, university students, professors, and anyone suspected of being a threat to the government were at risk of becoming a desaparecido. I had no idea that Argentina had such a terrible regime only a few decades ago. Our lecturer said that a lot of Argentines still don't respect authority figures, such as the army and police officers, due to their past.

On a brighter note, the bus tour was beautiful and brought us to several interesting locations in Buenos Aires such as the Recoleta Cemetery and La Boca. Recoleta Cemetery is an extravagant cemetery where members of old elite families are buried in family graves. It's unlike any cemetery I have ever seen and rather than marking tombs with gravestones, each family has a large house-like structure that holds all the coffins. The tombs are extremely ornate; some are decorated with marble statues, detailed carvings, and intricate metal work. La Boca is a neighborhood in Buenos Aires where predominantly immigrants lived in the late 1900s after migrating from Europe. Most of the houses were very colorful because supposedly when they arrived from Europe they didn't have enough money to buy houses and instead built them out of tin sheaths that they paint to cover up rust. Our tour guide told us the colors were so random because rather than buy paint, the immigrants would just go down to the nearby port and take leftover paint used to paint boats. There were several cute small shops in La Boca and dogs everywhere! No backyards = dogs in the streets. We also ran across a guy who called Whitney Barbie - she is a short blonde so it made sense and it made us laugh. We also saw the Boca Juniors stadium where soccer games are extremely popular. Our tour guide told us that soccer is so popular in Buenos Aires that it's practically the only thing that Argentines celebrate.

Yesterday we watched a movie in our culture class called La Historia Oficial, which I highly recommend. It takes place at the end of the Dirty War and is the story of a mother who finds out that her adopted daughter is probably a child of a desaparecido who died in prison. After class, a big group of us went to a pizza restaurant near our school and it was really different than American pizza but was pretty tasty. Mine tasted like a giant slice of garlic bread. Some of my friends also got wine with their pizza and when we were paying at the end I realized that my water was more expensive than their wine. Not cool. After we ate, we walked down one of the pedestrian streets looking at all the street vendors and watched a couple that was http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifperforming tango at one of the street corners.

Wow that was a very long summary of my first few days and I still probably forgot something! I included a guestbook on this website so if any of you have comments or questions just open up the guestbook and write me a note! Thanks for reading!



For more of her posts, visit her blog at: tab-argentina.webs.com

Sammy's twinkling memories in the City of Light

The lovely thing about Paris is that it is everything you expect it to be. The buildings are a study in weathered beauty. Their cafes have excellent food, and dogs prowl the aisles for scraps and affection. Sacre Ceour, Notre Dame, the Eiffel tower and countless other monuments surpass the description of magnificent. The language has a multifaceted lyrical quality. And the entire town teems with a complex history that is never far from sight. Suffice to say that I have loved Paris and believe I will never stop.
The lovely thing about my trip in Paris is that it was nothing I expected it to be. My host mom was not only sweet and helpful but also the proud owner of a parrot named Roberto. Paris served not only as a lesson in French but as a refresher course in Spanish as well. And Parisians are warmer than I expected, at least when an attempt at French is made. I learned more quickly at the school than I expected. And music is omnipresent in Paris. There are street musicians near most all of the major attractions that border on professional. There are free concerts in the churches that border on breathtaking. And the greenery of Paris gives it a gentler feeling than I have ever seen matched in a city of its size.
And then there is the Louvre. The Louvre was more resplendent than I could ever have guessed. The fact that I am only contributing one paragraph to the Louvre shows great personal restraint on my part. Admittedly I am aided by the fact that finding the appropriate words for my experience at the Louvre is difficult. I'll start by saying I went seven times and saw all of it. I went through every single room. And the amount of art in any one room is simply staggering. They have sculpture after sculpture, artifact after artifact, painting after painting. Twenty, thirty, forty paintings squeezed into one room. And they have dozens of paintings that I grew up knowing and loving my entire life. Seeing them in person bordered on a religious experience. And they have rooms, rooms as in plural, of Rubens, van Dyck, and Botticelli. And it's not just about classical paintings and statues at the Louvre. Sometimes you'll turn the corner and find a twenty five foot, astoundingly well preserved pillar from an eighth century temple. Not to mention the fact that they have an entire medieval moat on their basement floor. A moat! I cannot stress to you what a strange revelation that was. I can honestly say that if their security was lax, I would have taken up permanent residence and never come home.
Unfortunately not all surprises are good. In addition to being sweet and helpful my host mom was a smoker, and seemed to have difficulties with my house mate's request for vegetarian faire. It seems despite taking dietary and health requests, the information is not passed along to the host families. Also the neighborhood that my host mom lived in didn't feel particularly safe after sunset. And the school was touch and go as far as their teachers. The teacher I had for the first two weeks was très magnifique. But then for my last week I had a different teacher. He was by no means bad, just a little frustrating. He refused to use any English at all, because he thought it would help us. The problem was that included asking him how to say something. This resulted in some quite interesting pantomime. In general I just felt there were some communication issues with Accord. And as a side note, there are no books, but lots of worksheets. Which was fine with me, but it frustrated some of the other students. However, as I said, I do feel like I learned a lot of French very quickly.
Overall, every day in Paris felt like a dream from which I never wanted to wake up. For every wonderful thing I wrote about, there were ten more that didn't make it into my blog. There was the Musée d'Orsay, Rodin, and Moreau. There was the cafe that, if cafes were people, I would have married in a heartbeat. There was the excitement of using the IPA I had learned at UTD, for my own pronunciation guides. There was the joy of my weekly phonetics class. There were countless evenings spent wandering along the Seine and down picturesque Parisian streets. There were a million twinkling memories I made in the city of light that I will doubtful ever forget.

Philip’s European Travels

The last two and a half weeks have been quite an adventure. From stepping out of the metro into the middle of an unfamiliar city with only a sheet of directions about where to go and only the most basic grasp of their language to a nanotechnology conference, they have been full of excitement.

My apartment is in an excellent location-almost all of the famous tourist attractions are nearby. The Eiffel Tower is about 10 minutes away by foot. Between my apartment and the lab, I can walk by: Invalides (a military hospital), the Louvre, Musee d’Orsay, and the National Assembly (plus countless other awesome buildings that look important, but I haven’t quite figured out what they are yet). Add to this that no matter what, I have to walk by Notre Dame to get to work, as it is between the metro stop and the university. Also, the Bastille is somewhere nearby, but I haven’t taken a walk to go find it yet.

Having been able to spend time in both Paris and Budapest, one of the most amazing things about European cities is the amount of history and culture that can be found just by wandering the city. I can walk for hours and not tire of seeing the incredible buildings. Almost all of them look regal and of great historical important, but upon getting close to I often realize that they did not actually play such a significant part in history.

And of course, I must add a note about science, since that is what most of my waking hours are devoted to. As a continuation of my work in Dallas, this has really helped keep me grounded. With stepping into a drastically different culture and environment, it has been reassuring to have my work as something understandable (at least in some sense) and as a place where I can make real contributions even though I am still working to grasp and adjust to the cultural differences.

I have just returned to Paris today after being in Budapest since Saturday for a nanotechnology conference. While some of the details of the projects went over my head, I was happy that I could grasp everything at a basic level and follow the majority of the presentations that I saw. Besides being in a great city to explore and allowing me the opportunity to travel outside of France, the conference was good for expanding my awareness of what is being done in nanotechnology, as well as understanding the ties that a lot of these projects have to industry.

The wonder and excitement of these past few weeks leave no doubt in my mind that the remainder of my summer here will be awesome. As my French improves, I hope to be able to further delve into the French culture and make this a worthwhile experience culturally as well as scientifically.

Sachin Tours Europe with Waldo

Check out Sachin's Blog here: http://wanderingwithwaldo.tumblr.com/

I am a 19 (soon to be 20!) year old college student studying abroad this summer primarily in Italy and England. In Italy, I will be living in a castle in Dorf Tirol, a small village north of Merano, which is just north of Bolzano, which is east of Milan. I will be studying Venice with a focus on its Literature. Then I will go to Oxford to study Economic Game Theory as it applies to healthcare in a one-on-one tutorial. Throughout, I will be making trips to various notable cities including Rome, Venice, and Paris.

Everywhere I go, I will be bringing a Waldo plush toy and using him as my means of cataloguing my trip. I plan to take at least one picture with Waldo every day of my trip. I will try to update the blog daily, but may not have continuous internet access, so I may have to post some weekends together. Hopefully I don't lose Waldo along the way!