This will be the last blog entry from Austin. In three days I’ll be back in Argentina. The last week was really moved. On the weekend we walked around downtown and watched the graffities, played Top Golf, went shopping, went to the Spider’s House Coffee and went to some bars at night. Today we had our last ESL classes and had to say goodbye to many of our friends. What I most value about the ESL classes we had is not the grammar rules or English theory learned; what I most value is the intercultural exchange with other foreign students.  As the classes were composed only by international students, there was a great cultural diversity. My favorite part was debating about recent or controversial topics and getting to know the different postures depending on where the speaker came from. I could get to know a lot of different life stories, each one with its particularities that made it interesting. I leave this country with the promise of someday visiting these new friends at their home countries, and receiving them in Argentina. To make it short, professors where really cool too, all of them where open minded and made their best efforts to make their classes interesting and appealing.

What have I learned? Everything and nothing at the same time. I learned the proper use of a semicolon and the different cultures points of view towards immigration. I learned how banks hedge their risk and to never ask a Korean if she comes from South or North Korea. I learned the theory about the future tense, but at the same time realized that a place where no one is rushing and everyone respects traffic signals is not a utopia. I learned how to moderate a discussion and at the same time learned to always be polite and try to help tourists which are visiting your hometown. The point is that I learned some specific things in classes, but that knowledge come and goes, and can always be refreshed with a book. But I also learned more important things which aren’t written in books. This is pure and beautiful experience, which most of the times you are not conscious about acquiring, but this knowledge will stay in a little corner of your brain for the rest of your life. And each time you need it, you will look up with your eyes and pull a big smile when remembering how you acquired it: where were you, and who was by your side.

So yeah, it’s time to say goodbye. I will start by thanking Rachelle and Katie; you guided us in every step of this experience. Every detail of this trip was thought about and planed by them, every activity, the housing, the food, the trips, the classes and many other things that don’t come to my mind right now. I know that being our coordinator is your job, but it’s easy to tell when someone puts his full heart and soul on what he does. And you two my friends are that kind of people. You somehow managed to understand and respond to millions of questions from 25 Argentinians with crazy accents and where one of the key factors which made this trip amazing. Finally, I want to thank the other 24 characters that played an important role in this chapter of my life. As I mentioned before, I had zero expectative about the trip, the city, the classes and especially the people. But yes, you killed it. Each one of you has a key feature, as we like to point out, that makes you unique and amazing. So yes, again, you are what making a difference looks like. This blog will end as it started, with me sitting in the sofa and writing while chatting with my roommates; but this time my smile is bigger. 

Well, this week was moved. First I’m gonna tell you a little about what I did. I spent Wednesday night at Austin’s Airport. I’m not a fan of sleeping at airports, but my flight was at 06:00 a.m. and if I took the first bus on Thursday I wouldn’t had made it on time.  I also wanted to save money; a taxi would have cost me around 30 bucks. So, that was it, I slept barely an hour and arrived around 7:30 at Denver. I took a shuttle from Denver to Winter Park, a really small town which is dedicated exclusively to winter sports, and arrived at 10:30. Santi, one of my best friends, was waiting me to get to the mountain and start skiing. That was pretty much what I did from Thursday to Saturday: skiing and relaxing. Then, on Sunday, I ate the biggest breakfast that I have eaten in my whole life with a guy called Ian and headed to Denver. I spent the whole day walking through Denver by myself and had a really great time. My favorite part of the city was the Capitol, which has a huge golden rooftop. At 8:00 p.m. I took a plane back to Austin and arrived at the Towers at 00:30 approximately, starving and very tired, but happier than ever because of the great time I had had in Colorado.

To sum up, this long weekend was great; I could meet a lot of people, practice my favorite sport and get to know a new city. But now I’m gonna tell you about what most caught my attention during my trip: people. This word by itself explains nothing; the lifestyle of Winter Park residents was totally new for me. To start with, during the year, Winter Park has approximately 1.000 inhabitants; I’m being serious when I say it’s really small. I can’t describe the qualities of the residents with just one adjective, but they were kind, polite and very sociable at the same time. For example, each time that I walked past someone on the street, they salute you, smile and many times start a conversation. They also recognize you as a foreigner with just looking at you: “This town isn’t exactly your backyard, isn’t it?” told me a guy while I was walking in the street. Another great example was on the lifts. One day I skied alone for some hours because Santi was working. On every lift that I took, people started talking, and everyone explained how where their days going so far. In most of them people even invited me to ski with them and offered to show me the mountain, as well as giving me recommendations on where to go and what to visit. I found amazing how natural it was for them, this obviously doesn’t happen in Bariloche where I always ski. I think that they socialize so naturally because, as they are a small community, they rely on each other.  

Let’s see. This week has been great. As usually, we have been doing lots of stuff. Between trips and classes there is very little time left to sit and watch the sealing doing nothing, and that’s awesome. There is plenty of time for that in the year, it’s good that we spent most of the time here in Austin doing things that we wouldn’t do in Argentina. On the weekend we made a group trip to San Antonio, we arrived at noon, had lunch in a very original place, were the waiters were intentionally rude and had a lot of fun. Then we went on a boat trip through a river located in the middle of the city. The best part came last; we got to see San Antonio Spurs vs Los Angeles Lakers at the At&t stadium. I always watch NBA matches in Argentina and never thought I would have the chance to attend to one. It was really crazy, the stadium was like a city; it was full of restaurants and shops.  Even better, it was Kobe’s last game in San Antonio, so they made a huge tribute. All the fans were standing on their feet and cheering him. I think that was the best part, seeing that people can leave the rivalry behind in order to honor a man who was one of the all-time best at what he does, independently from the team in which he played. Another fun thing I did this week was spending a day at San Marcos. Ten of us rented two cars and travelled to the San Marcos outlets for the whole day with just one purpose: buying cheap stuff, which we did.

To resume, it was a great week, we had a lot of fun. But now I want to talk a little about a thing I found very interesting. On Thursday, as I had spare time on the afternoon, I went with some friends to an ESL talk. The activity consists on talking in English with people from different countries for an hour. As I arrived late, there was only one table left. The only one sitting on the table was one of my ESL teachers. Also, while I was sitting, I realized that this time there were neither donuts nor coffee (one of the main reasons for which I had come); this clearly wasn’t the best scenario. Resigned, I started talking to my teacher and found out something that caught my eye: co-ops (housing cooperatives). My teacher told me he lives in one so I asked him everything about it. They are like 15 owners of a house, who pay rent to themselves, divide tasks and act democratically in all kind of aspects. They need to have a consensus in order to make decisions and argue in order to convince the others. They divide all the tasks like cleaning or cooking and have a process of evaluation and voting to decide whether a new member is accepted or not. This seems to be very common in here, the next day a Norwegian classmate told me that he also lives in a co-op of 27 people. This may seem very normal here, but in Argentina it isn’t, and I think it’s a great idea. Everything is easier and cheaper in group. I think that the ones who can take the most advantage out of this are foreign students, who sometimes arrive here all by themselves and also have to go through all the monetary costs of travelling. I learnt to always take advantage of every situation, as dull as it may seem, because you always can learn something new. 

More thoughts

Two weeks have passed since our arrival and this place continues to amaze me. Everyday I’m learning something knew, and more importantly, new things that i wouldn’t have learned in Argentina. Each day that passes has its own style. Some days I visit cool places, some days I found out things about American society that I didn’t know, every day I meet different people and get to know amazing features about different cultures. So if up to this point you didn’t get the idea: this trip is awesome! I need to get back to the objective of this blog: sharing thoughts and experiences.

On Saturday we did a trip to Houston. We departed at 7:00 a.m. (that was the bad part) and traveled for 3 hours, but with lots of coffee and donuts which served as fuel for the rest of the day. Our first stop was at NASA, we visited the mission control, where the space mission and the International Space Stations are monitored and a lot of other cool things. The second stop was at the Houston’s Museum of Natural Science, where I was amazed by the dinosaurs, the mummies and especially the minerals and stones. The trip was awesome, but I want to reflect about something that caught my eye.

While were travelling in the bus I looked a lot through the window and couldn’t believe the dominant infrastructure in Texas. I currently live in the capital of Argentina, an enormous city. But in a junction of two roads, where in Argentina we would have a flat roundabout, here in Texas they have huge bridges which separate the highway from the ground so that cars don’t need to stop at any point. These are really expensive and hard to build structures. There were not one or two of this, the pattern repeated all the way from Austin to Houston, even at small towns. It requires a level of investment, planning and long-term thinking which is amazing.

The second aspect of the infrastructure which caught my eye was the shops. Shops are HUGE, they all tend to be flat (just one or two floors) but very wide, with enormous parking lots and way to much cars for the amount of people you see walking in the street. Also, most of them tend to have the same architectonic style, flat roofs and brownish painting. Shops are mostly multifunction; it’s extremely rare to find a small shop which specializes on one good. Here you don`t have a small “panadería”, a tiny “verdulería” and a “ferretería” each two or three blocks as we do in Argentina.

The way shops are designed obviously helps to increase the level of consumption of this society. You enter with the intention of buying a new shoes and end up leaving with 20 pairs of socks, 3 jeans, 5 shirts and an umbrella which you’ll never use, all because the products were on 70% off clearance. After buying all these things sometimes they don’t even ask you to sign after passing your credit card. Consumism is also encouraged by the facility to buy products online. Literally, only two clicks are needed to buy anything you can imagine in Amazon, my host family told me they even buy shampoo in Amazon. Its reasonable, why travelling when you have a perfectly coordinated system which delivers any product you want to your house by just moving one finger?

Okay, let`s write a blog.

First of all I need to advice the reader that this blog won´t have any particular structure. It won't be centered around just one topic. I will write about things I find interesting and appealing, things I like and dislike, things I learn. Most importantly, I will share experiences which will remain in my memory for the rest of my life; I hope to put many of those. 

Let's see, the first week has passed as I’m writing these words. Exactly eight days, it actually felt like eight minutes. I started the trip with no expectatives, neither bad nor good. This is not just a say, I’m serious: I knew nothing about the University of Texas, had very little reference about Austin (sincerely, I only knew that the summer XGames take place in this city every year), had no idea of what Texas was like (apart from some movie), knew nothing about the other 24 Argentinian students which now I consider friends, and worst of all, had no clue about the classes I’ll be taking part of.

The first week a lot of stuff happened. I won´t write everything step by step because you’ll get bored to death.

The female longhorns (the university team) played against Baylor on the University Stadium, they lost 67-80 and had their first lost in the season, but that’s not the point. What I found interesting about the game was the spectacle. Basketball is a paused game, there’s a timeout between each of the four periods, and a lot of small timeouts which are set by the coaches when they need it. They had a show for each timeout, long or short. There was a band playing, young cheerleaders and old cheerleaders, guys jumping and throwing backflips like it was nothing, a minigun which threw shirts in the public, a drone that flew around giving gifts, dancing cameras, throwing contests, lights showoff, food and drinks everywhere, even the court was turned into a dance floor for some minutes, I can continue enumerating things but I think you get the point: the sport itself wasn’t the main point of the event. I mean, it was great and I loved it, but I can´t even imagine how the girls were concentrated with all that stuff happening. Like when a bunch of guys pretend to go fishing, but spend the whole day sitting on a boat eating snacks and drinking beer. It was awesome, but very different to what I’m used to.

On Friday we had an activity called family host. It consisted of spending the night in the house of a local family. I thought it would be really boring, but turned to be one of the best activities so far. I went to the house of Rene and Ashley, a young couple who had studied here at UT. It was amazing, we had so many things to talk about that I wish we could have spent more time with them. They told us about their college experience, and there was one thing that surprised me the most: fraternities and sororities. I thought they were just a bunch of kids throwing parties. But both Rene and Ashley, who had taken part in one, told me that not. They are national organization with a lot of people working on its central headquarters, managing all the local branches. Moreover, boys and girls have just one chance in life to get in one, is like the NBA draft, where the different teams select the best rookies. If they fail, they are out forever. If they get in, they are part forever; they have a lot of pressure to continue their family legacy. What I found most interesting was that it really helps their professional career; someone who is hiring would give priority to appliers from his fraternity/sorority.