Orientation

Ok, I've got a bit of time around the house at the moment so I'm going to try and write a little bit about my first day of school.

Classes don't start until the 4th but today was the first of a three day orientation. As we arrive at the school this morning I was quickly introduced to a few other exchange students. I think three of them were Austrian and an American girl, one of the Austrian girls may have been German though. Austria, Germany-what's the difference anyway?

So upon being ushered into the classroom I slide(literally) into a seat that was not built for my American body. For visual reference:


we are introduced to a few members of the staff. They proceeded to speak rapidly in a foreign language, I missed most of that part. After the staff came Nacho, a Uruguayan student, and perhaps a part time comedian. Nacho gave us a short speech and began leading us through all sorts of introduction excercises/games. Thankfully none of these were especially awkward or embarrassing, as they tend to be in America.

I should also note, that the only two games that were winnable, I won. Setting the standard for US olympic athletes, I brought home the gold for Uncle Sam. The first of these games was a team game fairly similar to Simon Says, without requiring knowledge of the body parts, thankfully. The other, seemed to be a test of reflexes. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure what it had to do with getting to know your classmates at all. That said, I had to run to the middle of the (small) room and grab something from Nacho's hand and return to my seat. For maximum dominance you had to avoid being tagged on the way back to your seat. In true American fashion, I used my athletic superiority to obtain the prize and then deftly dodged a Mexican girl on the way back to my seat. I was, might I add, the only one who accomplished this feat.



I came to an interesting revelation during these introductions as well. Foreign people still have the same accents in Spanish, and French guys still sound stupid. I honestly thought the French guy(who has been here a semester already) was speaking "Ubby-Dubby"-you know what I'm talking about.

After classes I was supposed to call the house mother for a ride home. Because of some sort of phone complications, this didn't work out. So, I set out on foot. There was one caveat to this plan. Having been here for under 24 hours at this point, I don't know exactly where we live. So...I walk with another exchange student, a Spanish girl named...Lauria, Lewria, I still don't really have clue, who is living with the sister of my house mother. Using my inherent problem-solving skills, I try talking to Lucas, a member of this woman's family. Now I imagine Lucas, if he lived in New York, would have an accent that put Pauli from the Sopranos to shame. Talking to Lucas sounded something like this: "sha-do sha-deh shashasha shan". What I did gather, was some semblance of a way home.

Now it's a bad sign when you ask someone for directions to el Ombu, a landmark near my house, after losing my way, and they say "you're walking?!" This happened several times, as I zig zagged my way around looking for Boulevard Espana for a while, "It's almost 20 blocks!" They warned me. Thankfully, I have graduated from the Tim Malenfant School of City Travel which includes hiking from Central Park to Ground Zero, going back up to Times Square then swimming to the Statue of Liberty, etc.

I gladly hoofed it, and saw a decent bit of Pocitos(my neighborhood) in the process. Montevideo seems like a pretty cool city. You see a fair ammount of horses on the road, I probablly saw 4 today. I was told they were the poor people, but I think they are also the garbage people, or maybe they just take the garbage to find food..again, language barrier. The architecture is interesting, I saw a bank today with a pool, I'm thinking that getting a membership there would be a clutch move. None of the buildings seem to fit together in any sort of style really though and grafitti is rampant.

Shortly after finishing my trek Laura, Lorna(the English girl whose computer I am using at the moment :) )and Jose, her boyfriend from Peru, got home. Apparently they had gone to look for me, aware that something had gone wrong in the rendezvous process. They were surprised I made it home and impressed with my directional skills because "Lucas gave you terrible directions." Oh well, I kind of winged it anyway haha. I've included a few pictures from my little walk below(Edit:I'm apparently adding one picture because that is all that will work.):

I'm going to be running here shortly so I'm going to wrap this up. We are supposed to be going to some bar tonight with a bunch of the other intercambio students, whether this happens or not I can't say because without a phone life is difficult. And Mom-I actually have a phone down here already, I haven't sorted out if it works yet or anything though.