Hi everyone!
It was only last Monday that I packed up my backpacking backpack (36 pounds hahaha) and my school backpack and traveled all the way south from Portland, Oregon, to Arica, Chile. One week into the program, I am already feeling very comfortable with the transportation system, the food, and the people. I will post about my host family soon once I have some pictures to show you all!
Today was our first day of class. Thankfully, as an SIT program, we are not attached to the university because they are on strike and no one is in class. I started with my Spanish oral exam in the morning and felt pretty good about it because I was able to understand the questions and respond without asking the teachers to repeat questions. I also took the reading aspect of the test very seriously and took notes on the sheet of paper before they asked me several questions about what I had read.
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| All public universities in Chile (pictured here is the Uni de Tarapaca) are on strike because they want free tuition- there are marches weekly and no one has been in school for 3 months! |
I was really nervous before the exam, but it must have gone amazingly well I guess because they put me in the most advanced Spanish class here... which is not good news in my opinion. Since it has been a long time since I've taken a Spanish class at all (not since high school), I expected to be in the lowest level. I have a really hard time conjugating verbs and remembering vocabulary, but I am able to express myself without stuttering and falling over my own words. I am not sure whether they will be adjusting in the coming week, but I certainly hope I can keep up with the work.
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| Cathedral downtown |
I surprisingly already have a lot of homework for the first day. This afternoon, we had our first "Field Study Seminar" class where we went over different types of research papers (qualitative vs quantitative, etc) which was a good review and good to learn it in Spanish since all my classes are in Spanish! For Friday, we have a 2 page paper due where we have to analyze an abstract from a paper and determine what type of research was done. We also have to take our idea for our independent study project and classify what type of research we hope to do, which will be a good start in trying to focus my ideas!
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| Hilarious that Blockbuster is pretty much out of business in the US so it comes to S. America |
I have a bit of a headache from sitting in class... I am definitely not used to being bombarded with information in Spanish! I'm looking forward to the day when it just feels normal and I don't think twice about what's being thrown at me :) Questions? As always, marisaw@gwmail.gwu.edu
- Marisa
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