Foreign student, foreign politics

The weird part of studying abroad is when you have to really get in the place you are. I mean you start to relate with the city, the people, the school, but then at some point you start to relate with their social problems, political problems, etc. And the most difficult part is if it’s class activity. I have never been that into politics, of course we care about our countries problems, but reality is that no one cares about other countries politics.

My last activity for multimedia class, was to look around for some information about some debate occurring tuesday at night between two candidates for senator of Oregon state. The problem came as I did not know nothing about this, I did not know there are going to be elections, of course I did not knew the candidates and I do not know anything about american politics.

So the first part I was supposed to talk about the candidates, who were them, what were they doing. For me of course I had to first understand how american politics work, which I still don’t get really well. I look around for information about the candidates, I put myself a while to read about them, they have their personal websites in which they inform about their campaign but still I didn’t get like which are the problems they are supposed to solve, like why are the reasons people would vote for each other. I’m not from this country, I don’t know what people needs.

So in a way I could give a more objective view of what was going to happen in the debate. At the time the debate started, I could actually see the differences between one candidate and the other. One is totally into politics and the other is more like a work person who got into politics for some reason, and god, they liked to point that out!

I try to follow what they where saying, but even though a friend helped me and there were subtitles, it was difficult sometimes to follow what they wanted to say or why they were saying that or what was what they were talking about. So you can imagine me, pausing the debate or getting lost because I had to get explained so I could get the line of the conversation.

I most say it was an awkward moment, difficult thing. At the end I could manage it and kept on tweeting about what was happening in the debate, though I didn’t gave such a good background, neither anything else apart from what they were already saying I was able to follow it.

I just wanted to point out how difficult is to talk about problems and things you are not familiar with, or topics you don’t know about. But is just about the world each of us live in, and we can not know about everything. It was a new experience and well, as an exchange student I guess is all part of it. At the end I’m just a foreign student, in a foreign country, talking about foreign politics.