So we have been in Bordeaux for almost two months, and I can tell you now that the experience has been great! We have met so many people here at our school –Bordeaux Ecole de Management (or BEM as they call it)–, we’ve gone on some great trips, and we have enjoyed the business classes in school. Bordeaux as a city is extremely beautiful, and we can’t wait to take many more walks in the city once it gets warm!

The first week we got here and we were a little lost. None of us knew the school, the city, or the other students. The international group here (the Melting Potes) organized many little outtings for us to meet the other international students and some French kids, and we did just that! I can’t even count how many people I’ve met, but I can tell you that I have definitely met some life long friends here.

We started our classes January 12, and luckily, we knew almost half the students in our class because they were international students, but there were also many French students. I was very impressed to know that French students would take an upper level business class in English, but they did great in the class! We had two professors in this class-one Australian and one American. We had some amazing discussions in class, but some particularly stuck to me. One day, we presented something about the economy in our home countries, and I was surprised to know that 15 countries were represented in our class! That seemed like such an enormous amount! The class only consisted of about 50-75 students, but there were 15 different countries and cultures represented within those students.

This week we will start a new class for the next three weeks, so we will let you know how it goes!

We have taken some amazing trips in these past 2 months that I will never forget. Our first weekend trip was to the Pyrenees for a ski trip. Matt, Hassan, my Swedish roommate, and I went skiing with a ski group from our school, and we had a blast! I had only been skiing a few times before, but to say that I skiied down a few mountains in the Pyrenees is a great accomplishment!

Our next trip was to Paris. Ryan and I went for one day and night, and we visited a friend, Clementine, who was actually a French exchange student at the University of Louisville from Bordeaux last fall. In Paris, we got to see Notre Dame, Mont Martre, Sacre Coeur, the Moulin Rouge, and the Eiffel Tower, and we also had dinner with Gaelle (the other exchange student from Bordeaux). We did all of this in one day. Clementine was a great tour guide, and we enjoyed seeing her and Gaelle at least for a little bit. I’m sure we will be visiting them again very soon.

After Paris, I went to visit my grandparents in Provence and then my grandparents in Nice. It was so great to see them even if it was only for a few days. I usually only get to see them once a year in the summer, but I have gotten to see them in January and February this year. I am so grateful that I have this opportunity to study in France, the country I was born in and have loved for all my life, but also to be able to see my grandparents fairly regularly. It has been such a blessing, and I will always cherish this amazing opporutity I have been given.

In Nice, Ryan joined me, and we saw the Carnaval de Nice. My parents have told me about carnaval all my life, and it was great to finally see it! Kids were spraying silly string and throwing confetti everywhere as large carnaval objects made their way through Nice. We brought my twelve year old cousin to see it with us, and we had such a great time!

This past week, we have been traveling as well. On February 20 we began by taking a train to Brussels. We spent a few days in Brussels, then went to Amsterdam for three days, and then to Berlin for three days. Each city was very different from the others, but I loved every one of them. I had never thought of going to either of these places, and I just went along with the trip because Ryan, Hassan, Matt, and my roommate Annika were going, but I am extremely glad to have gone! Brussels was a very charming city. We ate many delicious meals, and very much enjoyed the Belgian waffles. In Amsterdam, I was surprised by how beautiful the city was! The canals, bridges, and apartment buildings went very well together to form a gorgeous city. In Amsteram we also visited the Van Gogh museum and the Anne Frank house. We haved learned so much about Anne Frank, and it was unreal to see the house in person. When I was standing in her room, I was taken aback by the fact that this was her room. This was were she spent hours writing her diary and afraid for her and her family’s life. This part of Amsterdam was probably my favorite, and will definitely leave a great impression on my life.
Berlin was definitely my favorite city out of the three we visited. Our first day in Berlin we went on a six hour walking tour, and I fell in love with the history. I had never realized how much history can come from one city! The history we had already known from World War 2, combined with the stories our tour guide told us, made the city that much more interesting to me. I remembered all I had learned from our history classes in school, and I couldn’t believe I was in the very spot much of this history had taken place.

Tonight I am actually writing from Berlin. Tomorrow morning we will visit a concentration camp just outside the city, and then we will get on a fourteen hour train ride to Paris. Sunday we will be back in Bordeaux to continue with school.

All in all, my study abroad experience has gotten off to a great start! Thank you very much to Betty and David Jones and Dean Goately for making these experiences possible. I have already done much more traveling than I have ever imagined, and I have learned more about myself in these past two months than I had in the first two years of college. I can’t wait to travel more to places I have never been, meet many more people, and learn a great deal both from the classes at BEM and my wonderful experiences.

–Aurelia–

How important is it for banks not to fail?  What would the streets look like if all your bank accounts were frozen, no one could withdraw money, and the economy could no longer operate?  Look no further than Argentina.  Today, is the anniversary of the corralito in Argentina, seven years ago, which is not all that long.  For many Argentines it is a stigma and an embarassment, something they want to forget; others are still bitter about those who took advantage during the crisis.  The corralito was the financial crisis in Argentina when all the banks failed and closed at once and one of the main reasons I wanted to study economics here - little did I know I’d be fielding questions from my classmates about failing banks back home.  

My friend told me that when he lived through the crisis, he and his roommates had to buy kilos and kilos of rice and staples to live off for weeks and supermarkets, the same I shop at every day, built barricades of shopping carts to keep out looters.  It’s hard to imagine these scenes you see in this video; being in Buenos Aires feels like being in Philadelphia or in Europe – or at least what I imagine Europe is like!  Argentina on a daily basis today looks NOTHING like this; protests today occur peacefully…soccer games are another story, though!

In la Facultad, they believe one of the key issues for developing Argentina is to finish paying off the loans and to get off the IMF loans and many people are bitter about the debt and loans (today total debt service eats up almost 5% of GDP); as they see it, they were accumulated by U.S. backed dictators who did not use it efficiently.  (Hence the references in the video.)

Watch this video for scenes from that time —– with vampire tangueros to boot; it has English subtitles.  The last one is much less colorful and short – and more violent – for those who want more, part of an entire documentary on Youtube, though in Spanish.  Che, te digo, studying the economy and having a healthy one is important.

12 Vampiros Tangueros

Memoria del Saqueo

This place is just 3 blocks in my house, and there are at least 2 others in town.  As I said in my previous post, in Buenos Aires, they KNOW what color Kentucky is – and that’s red -  apparently since 1942.

Also from my previous post, my roommate organized some local (as in Buenos Aires) independent filmmakers to show independent films about Bolivia on our roof!!  One was about the violence and crisis in Sucre this past Spring (our Spring, their Fall), the culture of the chola woman, and the best one Yerba Mala Cartonera, a film about independent book makers who print and publish their own books and bind them at regular fairs and comment on literature and access in developing countries.

One down…two to go.  I completed International Economics yesterday with a high enough grade to skip out on the final; it’s called being promoted.  Prof Soltz – he goes by Hernán to his students – told me he had some doubts about me at the start but my level of Spanish saved me and surprised him – and that I helped soften his bias against international students taking his course since no others have ever finished.  Why he didn’t warn me from the start, I don’t understand.  (To be fair, most of his international students have been German, while I had the benefit of being able to obtain some of the original articles in English.)  I still have Economic Growth and Economic Development to go.

I am so happy and proud to have passed one “materia” so far!  I really am proud; this has been such a challenging experience personally and academically.  I worked so freaking hard.  This sounds ridiculous to my friends who know me as a very good student….but for me it has just-been-a-victory-to-survive in this university!  I am the only visiting American student here at UBA’s College of Economics, and there are 50 international students – mostly Colombian, German, French, and Austrian – out of 40,000 students in just the public College of Economic Sciences.  I feel proud to represent and contradict over and over some biases my fellow students have about Americans.  Only a couple or three weeks ago, I received the results of our midterms.  I survived my 3 midterms without needing a recuperatorio.  You can retake and makeup one exam here, which sounds great, until you realize that because of that, it is not too difficult to fail with 3 questions, open response, 2 hours.  In all of my classes, I was the only, that is ONLY international student, non-native speaker to not FAIL my exams (Um, culture alert: they read your test grades OUT LOUD.), except for one other in Desarrollo who barely passed with the lowest possible score.  What I mean is we get no hand-holding for not speaking Spanish as a first language.  Actually, at such a huge public university, Argentine students get no hand-holding either. This is the big difference between the public and private universities here.  While the atmosphere breeds responsibility; still, the serious lack of student development programs and academic support also has its definite negatives.  All the students who come here have to be independent and mature, do their work, or face failing; I would say at least 1/3 of the native Argentine students in my course, or more, failed their midterms. 

I am skipping family Christmas, and so I look forward to finally getting to travel after exams until next semester begins because I haven’t gotten to do that yet much.  I have gotten to know – a little too well – Harrod and Domar and Ramsey and Romer and Stiglitz and Krugman and Shell and Dosi and Solow because I directly enrolled at an Argentina university, instead of opting for a regular program which do factor in the importance of outside excursions.  But that’s the exciting thing about study abroad – is that you can opt to study in places you have only dreamed of visiting and in a program that meets YOU where you are as a student and as a person.  Because I live on my own with a group of gals from Chile and Argentina and Mexico and France and not with Argentina “parents,” last weekend, I connected into the local cultural scene (which is amazing) when some guys estrenaron in Buenos Aires independent Bolivian documentaries on our rooftop terrace to an audience of 50, while earlier in the evening I made homemade ceviche from scratch with my Peruvian friend and her daughter last weekend.  I don’t have much free time, but I take time for culture, just mostly I’m studying economics. 

I leave you with some photos of the documentary event 3 blocks from my house…note that Pizza Kentucky knows what color Kentucky is about – that’s RED!  ¡Besitos argentinos!