Country hopping and the GRE!

Woo, the past few days have been very busy. We're now back in Buenos Aires but will hopefully leaving tomorrow night for Mendoza if we ever figure out how to buy bus tickets. I took my Psychology GRE this morning, and I am so relieved to be done!! The entire experience was a bit weird. I woke up insanely early this morning (my admission ticket said the test started at 8:30) so I could have time to flip through my review book one last time, eat a good breakfast, and get to the testing center (we had visited it yesterday to make sure I knew where it was) early, all that jazz. Well. Eben was nice enough to walk with me (mostly because I am a nervous wreck before standardized tests, and I probably would have mistakenly walked into a bus while reciting to myself the parts of the brain). So we're walking along, arrive at the testing center... and it's closed. Like completely locked up, the aluminum protective door thing has been drawn down, there is no sign of human life. Hmm. I started wondering if grad schools would still process my application without GRE scores on account of a closed testing center on Test Day. Thankfully the panic did not have too much time to set in because finally a security guard came and opened the building. Success!

So I'm sitting in the waiting room for someone to take me to the classroom... and I'm sitting... and sitting... watching more and more people my age trickle in for the GRE... By now it is well after 8:30, and while I'm not surprised that the test will not be administered on time (hello, we are in South America), my anxiety is slowly mounting. The nerd I am, I kept thinking of the Yerkes-Dodson law, which says that a certain amount of arousal leads to optimal performance, whereas too much or too little arousal is not so great for performance; in other words, being nervous is okay as long as you're not like crying and shaking (or conversely, completely unconcerned). So I kept reassuring myself that I could very well me at my optimal level of arousal/performance ability. Then I sat for some more. Finally at sometime after 9 am, a woman appears in the waiting area and says, "GRE? Come with me!" and the twenty or so of us scampered up the stairs. Then it took about another half hour to check everybody's IDs and registration numbers, put us in desks, read directions, fill out forms... the Argentine students had a great deal of trouble understanding the concept of a Scantron. You know how when filling out your name, social security number, etc. you have to write it in the assigned spot and then also fill out the corresponding bubbles underneath? They just didn't understand the bubbles. It took a while for the proctor to walk around the room and explain it to each and every one of them, and I just chuckled to myself-- who knew that a life of standardized testing could really come in handy? At least the Americans knew how to fill out the Scantron. :)

All in all, we didn't end up starting the test until about 10 am. There was a clock in the room that the proctor actually set back to read "9 am" when we finally started, which I thought was really weird. I was the first to leave, which always makes me nervous (am I too fast? the others too slow?), but I did double check my answers and go back to the hard questions. In the end, I'm still not sure how I did, but I think my review book helped quite a bit because a lot of practice test questions reappeared on the real test. And quite honestly, I don't care anymore because I am done with standardized tests!!!! CELEBRATION!!!!!

Now, back to other things. Uruguay rocked my socks, and Eben and I have agreed to go back at some point in the future and fully explore the country. We spent our second day in Colonia riding along the coast on a motorbike, which was fabulous. We explored the different beaches, saw the old Hippodrome (race track), and even the crumbling bull ring that is no longer in operation. What a rockin', bougy (bourgeois) place this must have been back in the day. Colonia is absolutely beautiful, the perfect hideaway. It's low tourist season now, so it really was just the perfect environment. I hope it's not chaotic in high tourist season because that would just ruin my pristine image of the town.

Montevideo was very different from Colonia. It's an actual city, though smaller and less hectic than Buenos Aires. It rained like whoa on our first day there, so we didn't get to do too much exploring until the second day. We did, however, see cool things like a gaucho museum and a crazy mausoleum in the center of town. We stumbled upon a big socialist party/rally the first night, which was pretty cool. There was lots of literature being passed around and even a big stage for musical performers. Eben went back to the rally to be a good leftist while I studied fun psychological things, so maybe he can write more about it in his next post. I did think it strange that there were so many police with drug dogs just randomly standing about, probably hoping to catch some hippie socialists smoking pot or something. OOH! Which reminds me, Eben and I saw two kids get patted down by police with two HUGE barking scary drug dogs on our second day. I don't really know how they caught, but they all of a sudden flung their hands to a wall with their feet spread, and one of the cops ordered them to empty their pockets. We don't know if they had been selling drugs or something, but it turns out they didn't have anything, so the police let them go. Kind of an intense experience, yet I found it very amusing. I don't know why. I really like the drug dogs and always want to pet them because they look like bears, but this probably jsut draws attention to myself. And one of the dogs might eat me.

Sorry this is such a scattered post. Next on our agenda is completing more grad applications (2 submitted, 982374 more to go!!), heading over to Argentine Wine Country, and then finally entering the last country of this journey-- Chile! My dad is awesome and has found us a possible volunteer stint at his old high school in Talca doing English conversation with the students. Nothing in confirmed yet, but hopefully Eben and I will be in Talca in about a week before going all the way down to Glacier and Penguin Land.

The moral of today's post is:
1. Be prepared to wait for a long time if taking the GRE outside of the United States. Other countries are not as time-obsessed as we are.
2. Applying to graduate school from outside of the U.S. is very frustrating and should be avoided if possible.
3. Both Argentinos and Urguayos speak with the same accent, but Uruguayos are cooler. Also, they drink way more mate and all times of the day.
4. Empanadas and good wine make life better.

¡Ciao!