This weekend I not only met with my conversation partner, but also met with another CIES student from China, Minjie. She and I talked for hours about her life in China, her job with little kindergarteners in Shanghai, her 7 year long distance relationship with her now husband, her parents and their prejudice towards her husband due to the fact that he is from Hong Kong, her wedding and their future plans as a couple!! I was so ecstatic to learn this much about the Chinese culture through her and all her stories, she had so much to share about her life and her opinions about Chinese and American culture. Towards the end of the night, she even let my try on two of her traditional Chinese dress wear from the Qing and Zhang dynasty, it was such an honoring and amazing experience!!! I learned so much about Chinese culture and am really motivated to learn Mandarin and visit China while I am abroad:)
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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