On the front wall of my classroom at the University of Buenos Aires, someone has spraypainted a stencil of the school’s most iconic graduate, Ernesto “Che” Gueverra. In the back of the classroom, two cracked windows let in cold air that sometimes smells like garbage and other times like cigarette smoke.

To get to the classroom by 8 a.m., I have to leave my apartment when it’s still dark out. After a 40 minute bus ride, I walk to class past a wall painted by supporters of Eduardo Duhalde, a contender in next year’s presidential election.

Inside the building, the walls are mostly made of unpainted cinderblock. Where there’s paint, it’s old and peeling.

That said, these are by probably the most colorful hallways I’ve seen anywhere. Posters are everywhere, telling you who to vote for in the school elections and which new radical newspapers to read. For a 6’3” student, it feels like an obstacle course. I have no choice but to duck under several banners, and leaving class the first day, I knocked over a sizable poster.

Most of the posters and grafitti have to do with school politics, which are huge at a university with the student body the size of medium-sized city. The main issue seems to be the school’s relationship to the city government, with one sticker in my class reading: “The UBA is not for sale. Not to Mauricio nor to Macri.” (Macri is the Head of the Government of Buenos Aires, essentially the city’s mayor.) School politics aren’t limited to the students, either. There are frequent strikes involving some of the faculty; apparently, there’s already been one this year.

The seminar I’m taking meets once a week for three hours. There are about 15 students; I’m the only American. The professor, a short man with glasses and slightly wild gray hair around his bald spot, says he’ll start giving us a break in the middle, but he hasn’t yet. No matter—last week, several students left class for their own lengthy breaks, with one holding a sandwich when he came back.

It would be understatement to say the UBA leans left. When I was picking courses, my academic advisor told me I needed a solid understanding of Marxist ideas to take some of the UBA’s seminars. And before my first day of class, my host mom warned me I’d hear a lot of anti-American propoganda. I haven’t yet, but it’s not hard to sense a political edge to my seminar.

The course is called “Municipal Government and the Metropolitan City,” and it looks at the way citizens interact with their governments in an urban area like Buenos Aires. My professor is especially interested in poor communities outside the official city limits. As a case study, we’re going to study pollution in the Matanza-Riachuelo River Basin, a region that includes many Buenos Aires communities. For my final project, I’ll be working in a group of four, scouring newspaper articles from the past 10 years to track concerns raised by neighborhood groups and the ways the government responded—or didn’t.

More than 300,000 students take classes at the UBA, but that can be a deceiving number, since it feels more like a school system than a single school. There are 13 facultades (roughly the same as “schools”), from social sciences to veterinary studies, housed in buildings spread across the city. There’s no on-campus housing in the American sense of the word, and I haven’t seen a single UBA hoodie or t-shirt or bumper sticker.

As a public university, the UBA is free. As a result, there are students attending UBA who couldn’t afford to study at the city’s private universities (like the University of Salvador, where I’m taking two other, also great, classes). But the UBA is far from just being the school for students who can’t pay private school tuition. It varies by facultad, but overall the UBA is overall considered the top university in the city, if not the entire continent. So while there are UBA students who couldn’t afford private school, there are also well-off UBA students who choose to study there because in their department, it offers the best education in the country.

And on Monday mornings in a small classroom with Che’s face on the front wall, there’s also an exchange student trying to blend in who’s thrilled to be a part of it all.