Submitted by Alexandra DiDonato on the 2013 fall semester program in Buenos Aires, Argentina…
The last week of class has come and gone, and boy was it a whirlwind of emotions. It was a crazy mix between being super excited for classes to be over, super stressed out about passing finals (which really isn’t as big an issue as it seems since the grading scale in this country is much more lenient than in the States), and being sad to say good-bye to all the new friends I had formed relationships with in my time here.
It’s funny, I found that I became friends with a lot of people at the University of Belgrano that under normal circumstances I probably wouldn’t have been as close with. Studying abroad with a bunch of international students is a strange thing, maybe it’s because everybody is basically in the same boat that we all got along so well. We’re all foreigners spending several months in an unfamiliar location with unfamiliar people and an unfamiliar language, and that was enough to more or less unite everybody. Nearly everyone makes the extra effort to talk to their fellow classmates or even random people they meet in the hallways and get to know them. I feel like back home I would normally gravitate towards certain types of people, namely those whom I have more in common with, and not really pay too much attention to the people sitting next to me in classes or hanging out in the hallways between classes. But who knows, maybe that will change now.
I’ll really miss these guys once everybody’s back home! But for now I’m just trying to spend as much time with everybody as I can before we all go our separate ways!
