On January 20th, I met Sulaiman at the same coffee shop. We discussed politics and the cultures of our homes. Sulaiman mentioned that Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, something that I didn’t know before. We then talked about democracy and other forms of government. During our conversation we realized that both of us studied political science for our degrees in university, so we had a discussion about different forms of government. Both of us also agreed that we typically don’t like talking about politics with other people. This conversation showed me that practice and comfortability really do encourage improvements. I noticed that Sulaiman was understanding me more easily and that we were talking about more complex things. We did use google translate quite a few times but not as much as we did for our first conversation.
My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
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