Sad, but true, I learned my lesson today. I have been in denial for over twenty years, but today, thanks to SJU and it already being time to register for Fall classes, being in two places at once most certainly is a fantasy. It's hard to believe that the semester on Hawk Hill is one month from being over, when mine is only hardly three weeks underway. It only took a solid four hours of planning from thousands of miles away, but I have a first semester senior year schedule. SENIOR YEAR. Where the heck did that come from?
It's unfortunate because I can't work it out that I have a 4 day weekend, every weekend, in PA like I have in BA, but the course material seems interesting so my 5 day work week should be worth it. I realized I was getting old when I took a look at the Economics course offerings and realized there's only one class that I haven't taken yet. Craziness. That's why it took me 4 hours to do my scheduling...I had to work around and economics class and a Spanish linguistics class that I absolutely have to take or I won't scary word starting with a g and ending in a raduate on time. AAAHHHHH!
Now I just have to wait around until Wednesday morning and registration will really be over and done with.
And onto important things, and back to Buenos Aires!
This weekend I played in my very first Argentine tennis tournament! I have to admit, I missed my SJU tennis friends... a lot. There's no replacing TOES :)
It was a small tournament...only about fifteen kids. Which is so much smaller than I'm used to. But it was awesome because it was the perfect, intimate opportunity for my friend Ben and I to practice our castellano on some porteños. Everyone was muy amable and they were all SO good at tennis! There's always the one cocky one in the group, and this one was in the form of the blond version of Rafael Nadal, who came complete with a sweat-band-tying-ritual. He was the only anti-social tennis "god" of the group though, so really in the scheme of things, he didn't matter so much. I played singles (terribly) for the first time in a long time, but the girl, Lucila, that I played against was a sweetheart. Then I met this boy Santiago who's in his second year at la UCA, one of the schools I'm taking class at. And then Lucila and this boy Hernán played Ben and I in mixed doubles which was a ton of fun! And best of all, the tournament was in another provincia, La Plata, so we got to see what life was like an hour south on the Autopista of Capital Federal. The weather turned on Sunday so the second day was rained out, but it's postponed until this coming Saturday, so I'll get to see all my new friends again on another day!
Another cool thing that's going on down here South of the Border is that I've been meeting with the acesora in charge of intercambio students that want to volunteer. We're working to start a Habitat for Humanity program down in Buenos Aires! There's a Global Village affiliate here, so we're hopefully going to start working within Capital Federal on the weekends, and then hopefully plan a Collegiate Challenge style trip in July after finals are over to the affiliate in Salta. So cool! And it'll ease the pain of not being home for SJU Collegiate Challenge this year. I'm excited to get started, and I'm anxious to see how their build sites function here, what kinds of materials they use, and what kinds of families they build for. I also think it'll be another great opportunity to practice Spanish with the local community, and it's even better since it's the local community that's in need.
This was just a short post, to tie up the loose ends of all things new and exciting going on down here, especially since I have about another 200 pages of reading for this week that still needs to get done...yay homework!
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