Hey, this would be great for my blog!

Playing set in the park and thinking of blog anecdotes. Yes, I have a scarf on my head....This class really worked for me in ways I didn’t expect it to. Initially I felt very self-conscious about posting. I have never written anything so public before and it created a lot of writer’s block for me in the beginning. I am really proud of how my confidence evolved over the course of the semester, especially lately as I have had to boldly pump out blog posts the last few days, and there’s been no time to worry. This class also helped me experience Buenos Aires in ways I would not have without the class. I found myself seeing the world around me in of blog posts. This sounds like a way to disconnect, and observe the city passively, but for me, it actually forced me to think critically about the culture I was experiencing. I would have some funny run in with a taxi driver, or a hostile twelve year old, and I would find myself thinking: this will be a great anecdote for my blog! I think without the class, all the inconveniences of being foreign would have just frustrated me, but through this class, I was able to appreciate these moments as unavoidable aspects of travel, which in a way is what I asked for choosing to study abroad. I also got some exposure to and practice with travel writing, a style I had never explored before. But I do have a few, tiny, really insignificant complaints… I thought the class was a little too big. I read in other people’s posts that they appreciated connecting with students at other study abroad sites, and sharing common experiences. I was only partly able to do this successfully. I would have liked it better if it had been a small group and I felt like I was keeping up with everyone, or almost everyone’s blogs. Rather when it came time to post a comment I would just randomly pick a post to comment on, with or without having kept up with all of the rest of their blog posts. As a result, I felt like I was getting a disjointed view of other people’s experiences abroad, which made it hard for me to connect to the other students. The only blogs I truly followed were the blogs of the other students in Buenos Aires, and I only followed their blogs because I know them personally, and often times the things they are posting about are things that directly affected me too, which kind of feels like cheating. I also wished the dates on the syllabus had been shifted for the Buenos Aires kids. I ended up completely ignoring, to the point of almost forgetting the suggested dates to post by, got totally off schedule and I screwed myself over in the end (if you haven’t noticed I’ve posted seven times in the past week, which is not what I initially intended to do). Other than those small complaints, I loved the class, and found it amazingly complimentary to my study abroad experience.