las aventuras en Argentina: Bicycle Race

25/3

We began classes today at La Universidad Torcuato di Tella, a small university located in the Belgrano barrio. After taking a short tour of the campus led by a woman from the exchange students office, our group was seated in a conference room for our first two classes. The first, literature, was led by the Dartmouth professor on the trip with us, Analola Santana. It was your typical first day of Spanish class: going through the syllabus and what to expect for the class, and an hour of conversing in Spanish. One of our term projects is to go out into an assigned barrio and do a mini research on its idiosyncrasies. Lucky enough, I was assigned Puerto Madero and the Ecological Reserve! So this means for class, I get to go outside in beautiful weather and look at plants and animals (reminds me of the good old days in Bio 16 [Ecology]). Our second class, Argentine culture, was led by a professor at the University. She is very amiable and excited to teach us Spanish, and does so by speaking slowly and repeating anything we don't understand.

Later in the day after class, we went on a bicycle tour organized by API. We got very lucky since earlier in the morning it had been raining, but by the afternoon the sun had come out and I actually had started to sweat. Our bicycle tour began in Recoleta and took us through the major (and biggest) parks in Buenos Aires, based around Recoleta and Palermo. The biggest park, Bosques de Palermo, is over 400 hectares, which is bigger than NYC's Central Park! On our bike tour, I saw everything from the Zoo (I'm going to the Zoo at least once one of these days...), geese (who I of course tried to make friends with), and many (MANY) statues. Unfortunately, the bike company provided us with bikes that were not very good, which is an understatement. One of our group members sat down on the bike and it collapsed (he ended up having to go to the hospital to get stitches), another group member was riding the bike and the wheel fell apart, and another fell in the mud (but then again, she wasn't very good at cycling). I would definitely recommend going on a bike ride if you are ever in Buenos Aires, but not to use the bike company that rents out "Naranja" bicycles. After the bike tour, I returned home to have "pizza" (bread with cheese and tomatoes) with Cecilia, my host mom. Tomorrow I have my third class, Spanish language and grammar, which will last two and a half hours. It is sure to be an adventure that I'll probably sleep through.