NATHAN RIX
Buenos Aires Columnist
“This is delightfully surreal!” exclaimed sophomore Jennifer Galvis while wandering the streets of a cosmopolitan city south of the equator. As the school year commences, Buenos Aires, Argentina greets Pepperdine students in the B.A. program with chilly temperatures. There’s both surging excitement and unpredictable novelty: Buenos Aires is an “other” world to many.
While students from around the world attend Pepperdine’s international program, common responses to culture and custom differences leave us in a blurred ecstasy filled with confusion and wonder.
Almost immediately, the intrigue of “otherness” in Argentina appeared. Upon seeing vehicles disregard traffic lanes and pedestrian walkways, sophomore Jason Eggleston said, “I can’t believe they actually do that!” After spending the first night with a home-stay family and being subjected to an alternate method of preparing the obligatory breakfast toast, sophomore Sonnet Frisbee said, “They burn my toast black and then scrape it everyday.”
Often during immersion into a culture that is foreign to one’s own, tension erupts between the known and unknown. Some students find new differences blatantly offensive, but our eagerness to see Buenos Aires as new and occasionally uncomfortable has ultimately revealed the adaptive nature of Pepperdine students as we explore a world beyond the United States.
As we attend classes at Universidad de Catolica (UCA), our attempts to blend in and establish friendships with those at the Catholic university add to the surreal nature of our experience. Making local friends, including with fellow students, is a top priority despite our varying levels of Spanish.
Cultural differences can play on our natural reflex to retreat into comfort zones. Our group of 51 students enjoys one another very much — it’s not rare to see masses of Pepperdine students laughing together at a local café or restaurant. As we meet for various outings, an outsider might laugh as we grasp for familiar linguistic air, speaking rapidly in English.
Yet however strong and passionate the honeymoon phase might be, the excitement eventually dissipates. As several near-car accidents and minor problems with theft combine with negative first impressions of some professors, some students have expressed homesickness. Diving headfirst into a foreign culture comes with expected difficulties. But in one week alone, the stretch marks of growth have yielded knowledge and strength as well as a strong sense of adaptability and perseverance. Bonds within the group provide the warmth of familiarity, and overriding it all is the formative desire for group harmony and eagerness to participate in a foreign culture.
Fortunately, Pepperdine students are adaptable. We’ve allowed both good and not-so-good experiences to shape our thoughts and attitudes. We’ve embraced the surreal nature in which we live, knowing it will deepen our understanding of life on this planet.
While roller coasters of experience and up-and-down emotions will undoubtedly continue, we hold to what we know is true and pursue our futures with unshaken determination in Buenos Aires. Life will unfold in this strange but intriguing world of alterity, both odd and familiar, for the next nine months. To quote the film “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” we’ll be “too weird to live, too rare to die.”
09-08-2005
