exchange: my impressions about it

In the last days we ended also the exchange with our American peers and I have to say that this was an interesting experience, even though I spoke with my peer Rocio only two times, due to technical problems and so I unfortunately lost important moments of the conversation and the possibility to interact.
Our peer was actually Spanish and not American and she spoke with us mediating American and European culture, she made us see differences and similarities between both cultures and she provided also examples taken from her life in Spain. In this way I learnt a lot of new things and different habits, especially those regarding students routines and organization inside the University. Italian and American University systems differ a lot: at school, American students are never left alone in their learning process, instead in Italy we are responsible for our learning and we are in most cases abandoned by our teacher. Students are differently organized also in their spare time: American students create groups and clubs, while Italian students have to organize themselves their free time. I think that also our peer learnt something new about Italy and Italian students life: for example, the way in which we spend our free time, the kind of accommodation we have…As we mostly talked about habits, in some cases we had to explain some of them, because here in Italy we have habits that they don’t have in America or in Spain. For example, to Rocio was strange that in Padua students do not live in a campus but in different flats distributed all over the city and she did not know what “pendolari” are, so we had to clarify these points.
Our peer was nice and talkative, but a negative aspect was that she was more interested in doing the Skype exchange than in writing the wiki page and so we had to do also her part. Moreover, she wasn’t really independent on doing the wiki page but she was continually asking us or her teacher on how to do certain things. So I thought she misunderstood the fact that everyone of us can do this work independently, choosing by herself the topic she wants to focus, the words she wants to use etc. and we thought that it was due to the fact that American teachers tend to follow their students too much, differently from Italy.
However, I found the exchange an important experience to approach a culture in a direct way. Listening to people who live there is surely more useful than, for example, reading information in books or newspapers. It is not always possible, however I think that the best solution to deeply know a culture is to stay in that country for a period of time.