Favorite Place Yet

It’s an old five story building that has holes for windows - but not all the holes are covered with panes - and if panes, there are definitely no screens. If you expect a toilet seat or toilet paper, you’re out of your mind. The floors are as dirty as any Buenos Aires sidewalk or street, littered with cigarette butts and dirt and…? Graffiti covers the interior walls, demanding justice, communism, freedom, peace, revolution, with photos of Che, and a few knocks on good ol’ G.W. Other walls have detailed murals. In the hallways, venders sell homemade alfajores, cheap sandwiches, sweet breads filled with marmalade, and bottles of Coke. Others sell Argentine literature. Outside the entrance, dread-locked men and women play guitars while selling wooden/leather jewelry or books on revolutions. Inside the building is an open space. At all hours, there are people playing chess and drinking Quilmes beer or smoking marijuana, or often times doing all three. Sounds of wooden flutes and folk guitar songs float into the unscreened windows. This building has been the birthplace of political and social revolutions in Argentina, and continues to be a liberal political hotspot. What is this place?

This is my university. University of Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras.

15,000 students of all ages crowd the halls regularly, eager to take advantage of their free education at the best university in Argentina. Students steal broken desks from neighboring classrooms and pack into the sticky, non-air-conditioned rooms. When stolen desks fill the classroom, students sit on the floor, stand against the walls, and flood out into the hallway, straining to hear the words of their poorly paid but brilliant professors who can’t move around the classroom due to the flood of desks and bodies. When students ask a question, they attempt to phrase it perfectly, treasuring the opportunity to hold the respected professor’s attention; they hang on his/her every word. Students smoke in the doorways of classrooms because they really want to hear the lecture, but can’t resist a cigarette.

The students are “muy distinctos” (aka there are none like them anywhere else). They walk into random classrooms to interrupt and make announcements, or to hand out fliers about political happenings (Saturday there was a demonstration and march through the city) and political movies that are shown in our courtyard under the hazy cloud of marijuana smoke. In the courtyard, they paint signs calling for actions of justice and then hang them in the entrance. They tape and plaster papers for meetings and demonstrations all over the walls and doors.

If I make it through my classes with B’s, it will be a miracle, but if I make it through “la UBA” in general, it will strengthen me more than any other experience of my life.

I love this place. It’s raw. It’s beautiful in its idealism -- beautiful in its dirty floors, broken windows, graffiti covered walls. The student body is beautiful in its desire to learn, to change society, and in its boldness. La UBA is a mess. “Un kilombo,” they say here. But it’s Argentina at heart, and there is no place I would rather be.