Cultural Exchange

Last Thursday my classmates and I met 12 students from Melbourne, Australia whose came to San Luis to work in a project called “Realidades y Ficciones de la Argentina”. They are going to stay here in San Luis for eight days and they will learn about our culture. Then, they will visit Buenos Aires and  learn about their culture too. This is a project that our language teacher is working since 8 months with the Australians´ teachers. At the beginning of this year, our teacher informed us about this project and we knew that we needed to prepare and present some cultural aspects from San Luis such as history, literature and legends. That is why my classmates and I decided to include as much information as we could just to let them know a little bit of our province and the customs attached to it. My team and I were in charge of San Luis literature. We decided to talk about a local writer called Antonio Esteban Aguero whose poems are recognized nationally.  The poems my classmates and I decided to work with are “Digo la Tonada” and “Digo la Mazamorra” in which the author portrays different cultural aspects from San Luis. It is important to mention that as we collected the information not only did we remember many things we had forgotten about San Luis but also we learn things we did not know. I strongly believe that this kind of experience is quite positive for us because we enrich our knowledge as regards our province and at the same time we become more cultural aware. In this case, we learned many things we did not know about Australia. When the students started explaining some things, I felt that I knew very little about them. For instance when they talked about their abbreviations…OMG they were almost impossible to understand!!!  Now, I know why I cannot understand a test with a listening activity coming from Australians LOL.  Despite the fact that we exchange many cultural aspects, we also had time to talk about other kind of things in order to break the ice. All in all, I could say that it was a really beautiful experience and I really hope I can continue having this kind of experiences, they are great! Don´t they?