School is a bit different here...

Have you ever traveled to another country and started to realize that what you are accustomed to isn't necessarily the norm? I have been in Lima, Peru now for about a month and since starting school three weeks ago I have begun to notice there are a number of differences when studying in a foreign country. First off if you have ever wanted to be treated like royalty at school and you have never known the key to getting those special treatments, well I have one easy solution for you...GO STUDY ABROAD! While I wasn't seeking to attain special privileges and break the rules I have been realizing that international students get a nice break as international students or "intercambios."

As an intercambio the first thing I noticed that I get slack on is where I enter the school. I do not go to a private school in the United States so I am not used to needing an ID to get into the gated university, but here in Peru all students must show ID to get into school. I, however, get by with being a "gringo" from the US so I don't need an ID. On top of not needing an ID to get into the university I just realized that I have been entering an exiting at the teacher and visitors entrance where Peruvian students are not allowed to use. Since I want to blend in as much as possible I will now take the other entrance and exit in order to follow along with the school policies that were not told to me.

Along with the being treated like royalty and not needing to abide by all the rules I have noticed that time here in Peru is pretty relative. By relative I do not mean we are talking about physics and all, I mean when class starts at 9:00 AM don't expect the teacher or all the students to be there. In the US if the teacher is more than 15 minutes late class is officially canceled, here in Peru I think we have to stay at least half an hour before it is okay to leave. The same goes for a business meeting, don't expect your meeting to have a hard starting or ending time, just go with the flow.

Besides clocks being meaningless and having extra privileges around school there are a number of other things that are a bit different which include:

• Printer paper is not 8.5" by 11" rather it is A4 which technically is 8.25" by 11.69". Since the paper size is bigger that means you have to write more and all your papers will not fit in a normal binder or folder brought from the US.

• Page alignment on a typed paper is also different here. In the US we normally align everything to the left, but here they use "justify text" so that both the left and the right are flush with the page.

• Freshman at the university are also younger, they check in at around 16 to 17 years old compared to the typical 18 years old in the US. While that is not bad it does mean that all the Freshman are still very eager to volunteer to answer questions in class...while we may call those people the teacher's pet in the US, here it is the norm for ALL the younger students.
• Buying books is also very different because rather than buying new books the teacher takes a copy to the copier and they proceed to copy the full text and sell it for very cheap. Here I paid 50 soles which equals about $20 for a full text for my International Business class which has about 800 pages. On top of that all materials given for the class can be copied at the various copy centers around the nearby "copiadoras."

• Assigning homework can also be done over email after class without any forewarning so I have to be prepared to go from having no homework to being swamped with just one email.
• The final thing I will mention is that class attendance is taken daily but you are able to miss 30% of the classes from the semester without any negative affect on your grade besides not getting the material.

All in all I am really loving life here in Lima and I am excited to continue to learn more about the Peruvian culture and the Spanish language!

After reading this post is there anything you have noticed when traveling abroad that is different from your home country's customs?