Examenes Parciales
So I don't have school for the next two weeks because everyone is supposed to be hunkered down studying for the mid-terms. Luckily I only have 2 mid-terms and a paper whereas most of the locals have 4 midterms. Some of the other foreigners have no midterms because they are taking classes like Photography and bullshit like that. Turns out I am getting a great deal on San Andrés. I am paying what a semester would cost for a home school tuition, roughly $3,000; people from UPENN, on the other hand, are also paying what it normally costs them to go to school for a semester: $15,000. That means they are paying five times as much as I am. Holy shit. In case you were wondering, the Argentineans pay about what I pay.
The sands of time are passing ever faster. Over two months I have been here. Two months is a lot for a short time, but short for a long time, if you know what I mean. It's hard to notice any vast improvements in my Spanish on a day to day basis, but when I look back to two month younger Taylor, he could barely have intelligent conversations. Right now I can have medium intelligent conversations but I always get tripped up when talking about hypothetical things because the verb tenses are a huge pain in the ass.
Economics: That's sweet that it is one of the worst times ever to be in finance, and that's the career I've elected. Two of my argentinean professors are almost giddy about the situation even though it's going to affect Argentinean markets too. It's not that they don't like the US, they just are happy to see that it isn't perfect. It's like when the kid with a 4.0 gets a B and his grade drops to 3.99, and everyone else feels better about themselves or when the Patriots are on the cusp of having a perfect season but lose in the SuperBowl. Maybe there is hope for the US economy. Today the US markets raised around 3.5%, the most since 2002 I think it said. This is likely just do to the government intervention though. Side note: the Buenos Aires market raised 10% today, that's unheard of. Structurally, though, I still feel there are a lot of things wrong with finances in America, and at some point we're going to have to confront them. The average household has $8,000 dollars in debt with the total consumer debt in the US at $1.7 trillion. The US government has over $9.3 trillion dollars in debt and has spent more than it has taken in through taxes for 31 of the last 35 years. With social security will start paying out more money than it takes in by 2019, and by 2041 it won't be able to pay all the people it's supposed to. Ok, enough of doom and gloom, happy thoughts.
This week was Student Week in Argentina so every day at school we had a large inflatable toy in the middle of the main area for students to play on. Again, I feel like I am in high school, but the toys were pretty fucking fun. The first day was a very large inflatable where people played human fooz ball. The players were tethered to the walls with strong bungee cords like a fooze ball table and they played soccer. It was smaller, only 5 people per team but pretty legit. Unfortunately, I didn't play because there was a long line. The second day I did play, this time it was American Gladiators. There were four inflated columns with an inflated area down below and players would use those sticks with pads on each end to try to hit the other people off the columns. Photo to explain:
It goes without saying that I dominated. Everyone was having a great time until inevitably one kid got smashed in the face and his nose started bleeding like the girl who gets hit by the volleyball in the pool in Meet the Parents... and so they took the sticks away. :( But what did they think was going to happen? You can't just expect to throw out American Gladiator sticks and a large inflatable toy with columns to battle on and not expect some collateral damage. Plus, every guy was obviously trying to show off in front of the girls who were watching which just escalated things even further. The other days the inflatables sucked. Not even worth mentioning them. It's almost too much to mention not mentioning them they were so bad. I should have just ignored any reference to them at all. Now I've just dragged it out.
Bought my UW dawg pack season tickets today for basketball, this doesn't concern anyone but me.
I still haven't received any word on the package you guys shipped to me a week and a half ago... is that bad? I really hope the customs officials didn't confiscate my two pairs of jeans, jacket, shirts, and apricots. Side note, I've still been wearing the same pair of jeans, it's just too many days that I don't care to count anymore. I wash them so they are clean, but still. In fact, I have very little fashion it seems. Last Friday I guess we were going to more a high end club and i was wearing a soccer jersey. One of the Argentinians thought that I would look out of place so before we left he gave me his jacket to wear over my soccer jersey so that I might be a little more classy. Also, he told me that I shouldn't wear my usual black athletic shoes to clubs because that's what poor people wear. What the fuck! I honestly don't care that much about what I am wearing as long as it is clean and not blatantly stupid. Stop harassing me.
Cooking has been going fairly well and i am learning how to make more and more things. The first thing I learned was that at all times you should have the following ingredients:
rice, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, milk, cereal, salt, spices, flour, eggs, pasta, tomato sauce, chicken, beef, sandwich meat, lettuce, bread, orange juice, bananas, mate, and hot sauce. With these things you can't make anything you need. A lot of the time I just cook things that have no name with the above ingredients. Just as I go, "ya, that'll be good," until I have something. For example, for dinner today, I had rice with avocado and salsa mashed in and soy sauce on top. It was really good but I don't know what I'd call it. (I realize soy sauce wasn't on the list.) Alright, I'll call it good. Soccer game tomorrow and nothing else. Nos vemos.
The sands of time are passing ever faster. Over two months I have been here. Two months is a lot for a short time, but short for a long time, if you know what I mean. It's hard to notice any vast improvements in my Spanish on a day to day basis, but when I look back to two month younger Taylor, he could barely have intelligent conversations. Right now I can have medium intelligent conversations but I always get tripped up when talking about hypothetical things because the verb tenses are a huge pain in the ass.
Economics: That's sweet that it is one of the worst times ever to be in finance, and that's the career I've elected. Two of my argentinean professors are almost giddy about the situation even though it's going to affect Argentinean markets too. It's not that they don't like the US, they just are happy to see that it isn't perfect. It's like when the kid with a 4.0 gets a B and his grade drops to 3.99, and everyone else feels better about themselves or when the Patriots are on the cusp of having a perfect season but lose in the SuperBowl. Maybe there is hope for the US economy. Today the US markets raised around 3.5%, the most since 2002 I think it said. This is likely just do to the government intervention though. Side note: the Buenos Aires market raised 10% today, that's unheard of. Structurally, though, I still feel there are a lot of things wrong with finances in America, and at some point we're going to have to confront them. The average household has $8,000 dollars in debt with the total consumer debt in the US at $1.7 trillion. The US government has over $9.3 trillion dollars in debt and has spent more than it has taken in through taxes for 31 of the last 35 years. With social security will start paying out more money than it takes in by 2019, and by 2041 it won't be able to pay all the people it's supposed to. Ok, enough of doom and gloom, happy thoughts.
This week was Student Week in Argentina so every day at school we had a large inflatable toy in the middle of the main area for students to play on. Again, I feel like I am in high school, but the toys were pretty fucking fun. The first day was a very large inflatable where people played human fooz ball. The players were tethered to the walls with strong bungee cords like a fooze ball table and they played soccer. It was smaller, only 5 people per team but pretty legit. Unfortunately, I didn't play because there was a long line. The second day I did play, this time it was American Gladiators. There were four inflated columns with an inflated area down below and players would use those sticks with pads on each end to try to hit the other people off the columns. Photo to explain:
It goes without saying that I dominated. Everyone was having a great time until inevitably one kid got smashed in the face and his nose started bleeding like the girl who gets hit by the volleyball in the pool in Meet the Parents... and so they took the sticks away. :( But what did they think was going to happen? You can't just expect to throw out American Gladiator sticks and a large inflatable toy with columns to battle on and not expect some collateral damage. Plus, every guy was obviously trying to show off in front of the girls who were watching which just escalated things even further. The other days the inflatables sucked. Not even worth mentioning them. It's almost too much to mention not mentioning them they were so bad. I should have just ignored any reference to them at all. Now I've just dragged it out.Bought my UW dawg pack season tickets today for basketball, this doesn't concern anyone but me.
I still haven't received any word on the package you guys shipped to me a week and a half ago... is that bad? I really hope the customs officials didn't confiscate my two pairs of jeans, jacket, shirts, and apricots. Side note, I've still been wearing the same pair of jeans, it's just too many days that I don't care to count anymore. I wash them so they are clean, but still. In fact, I have very little fashion it seems. Last Friday I guess we were going to more a high end club and i was wearing a soccer jersey. One of the Argentinians thought that I would look out of place so before we left he gave me his jacket to wear over my soccer jersey so that I might be a little more classy. Also, he told me that I shouldn't wear my usual black athletic shoes to clubs because that's what poor people wear. What the fuck! I honestly don't care that much about what I am wearing as long as it is clean and not blatantly stupid. Stop harassing me.
Cooking has been going fairly well and i am learning how to make more and more things. The first thing I learned was that at all times you should have the following ingredients:
rice, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, milk, cereal, salt, spices, flour, eggs, pasta, tomato sauce, chicken, beef, sandwich meat, lettuce, bread, orange juice, bananas, mate, and hot sauce. With these things you can't make anything you need. A lot of the time I just cook things that have no name with the above ingredients. Just as I go, "ya, that'll be good," until I have something. For example, for dinner today, I had rice with avocado and salsa mashed in and soy sauce on top. It was really good but I don't know what I'd call it. (I realize soy sauce wasn't on the list.) Alright, I'll call it good. Soccer game tomorrow and nothing else. Nos vemos.
Comments
You're paying a fifth of what UPenn students are, but UPenn is one of the top 10 school in the country. And it would seem as if they are also getting a pretty significant discount of about 60%, being that tuition at that Ivy League institution is ordinarily a cool $37K. You should demand that your tuition be lowered proportionally, to $1200! (Oh damn, I forgot that this is for only one semester. I would have deleted it myself, but I put so much work into it that I feel that it would be a waste to delete it. At any rate, please disregard the previous paragraph...)
Where did you get all the stats? The US borrows in US dollars (a humongous commodity since worst case scenario the government can just keep printing treasury bonds), so to my understanding the national debt isn't as big a deal as everyone is making it seem. But I guess consumer and corporate debt IS a big problem, as we've been able to see over the course of the past few months. Hey man, don't worry about finance -- you can always work for the federal government. The good thing about that is the US government can never go bankrupt!