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.