Studying, Training and Working

I started taking Spanish classes at la Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) at the beginning of January, and am now in my third intensive class and level! The professors at UBA have been great, the tuition is incredibly low, and my classmates have been an interesting mix of people from all over the world. Spanish seems to be a fairly easy language for English-speakers to learn. Not only do we share basically the same alphabet, but many words are cognates so more often than not, it's easy to guess the meaning of a new word that I've never seen before. I’m continually amazed by my classmates from countries like China and Russia, who started with completely different alphabets and have far fewer language resources available—if there’s a second language here, it’s English.

This month, I've also been taking a conversation workshop at UBA. With only 5 people, it's a nice small class and provides an opportunity to get lots of speaking practice! We spend a good deal of time doing listening comprehension activities with songs and radio broadcasts. I've also gotten some speaking practice at an event called Spanglish, where our friend Jill B. works. Spanglish pairs a native Spanish-speaker with a native English-speaker for about 5-10 minute intervals. During that time, you speak in both languages, for half the time, so both people have the opportunity to practice the one they're learning . Then one person moves to the next table so you continually meet new people throughout the night. It's kind of like speed dating without the dating part, unless you're looking for a date, in which case you can try to flirt with strangers.

I've also been taking two juggling classes in Spanish at different cultural centers. One of them meets for 2-3 hours every week at Circo Criollo, which is only a 20 minute bus ride from our apartment. I love this class because it's made up of only myself and 1-2 Argentineans, which means I get to learn a lot from the instructor, and everyone at the center is incredibly nice. Since the class is so small, I also get plenty of Spanish-speaking and a lot of listening practice! The other class I'm taking meets twice a week for two hours at a neat place called Circo Trivenchi, located in the Barracas neighborhood. It's a cooperative, so once you pay a monthly fee for using the building, you're allowed to take any class you want. Instructors are compensated a la gorra (by the money you put in their hat). The hat is placed on the side and people walk by it on their way out, which allows everyone to pay what they can on a sliding scale without feeling like they're being judged. It's a great system because it makes all of the classes available to nearly everyone without making them feel guilty for being unable to pay for classes upfront (like you have to at other cultural centers). I enjoy these classes as well, but it takes me a full hour to get there on the bus or the subway! And they're a little larger, so I've met more Argentinians but gotten less individual instruction in this class.

I also started working for a consulting company that works with search-engine optimization/marketing for companies in the U.S. I write articles, which this company then places on various websites and blogs. The articles aren't necessarily supposed to be written very well, they're just supposed to follow a few guidelines and include some hidden keywords. By putting more content on the internet that includes those keywords, the company can increase traffic to their customers' websites and move those websites into a higher position on search engines (so you see their product first when you search for those keywords). Even though I can write about pretty much anything I want as long as I include those keywords, you can only get so creative with keywords like home security system. But so far, the positives outweigh the negatives. The nice thing about this job is that I can choose how many hours I work and I get paid electronically in USD. If I work only 20 hours a week, that more than covers my living expenses here and leaves enough time to take Spanish and juggling classes, which is what I really want to be doing here.