Tuesday, September 29, 2009

The first day of school is always scary.

Starting classes at CASB or UPF wasn't really that daunting. With the CASB class, I already knew Juanjo and all of the kids around me and at UPF, the campus is small, manageable and organized.


But today I embarked on my first UAB journey and opened a whole new can of worms.


I left this morning, literally, at the crack of dawn. (The sun was just beginning to light the streets as I made my way to the metro.) I was worried about being able to find my class after hearing horror stories from friends who yesterday, wandered for two hours and still could not find their classrooms. But I got off the metro and with shocking ease, located the building for Ciences de Comunicació (Communication Studies). The class I was looking for is one I thought would perfectly fill my comparative politics requirement. Though strangely housed in the faculty of journalism, the class in question was "Instituciones Politiques Contemporanies."


I found the classroom with relative ease and even had time for a café. Everything was going smoothly, even if I was seemingly the only American present and mildly terrified to speak to anyone. The professor strolled in a few minutes late, pulled up a word document, and started speaking. In catalan. This could be a problem.


I felt like Xavier in L'Auberge Espagnol, and for the next 90 minutes, frantically copied any charts the professor displayed and attempted to garner what the hell was going on. I kept a close eye on the students around me — whenever one of them wrote something down, I figured an important point had been made. At the end of the class, my notebook page was a jigsaw puzzle of English, Spanish, and poorly spelled Catalan.


I went up to the professor after class to ask if there was another section that was taught in Spanish (as I had been led to believe this one would be). When I introduced myself as an international student, he looked at me inquisitively and simply stated, "So you didn't understand any of that." (He was, however, pretty excited about the fact that I was from New York.) He said he there definitively was a castellaño section — he just didn't know what time it was at.


Figuring I would return to this conundrum later, I made a beeline for the Ciences de Politiques building for my next class: "Relaciones Internacionales." When the TA (who introduced the first class) pulled up a Powerpoint in Spanish, I could not have been more relieved. Until he clicked to slide two. Which in big bold letters, announced that exchange students could not take the class unless they were staying for the entire year — a statement counteracting an entire email exchange I had had with UAB about this specific class. Also: this could be a problem.


Now I'm back in the communications building. Here, if you want to speak to an administrative office, you take a number as if you were at a deli counter. So with my #166 ticket in hand (we just hit #130, so it may be a while), I am waiting.

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