I had another tutoring session with Turki this week. Last time we focused on speaking skills in preparation for the IELTS exam. This time he wanted to work on reading comprehension again instead. We did the usual read through, where I read a passage and then he read the next. Afterwards, we went through the questions and answers together. He struggled with this and I believe it was due to the difficult level of the passage. Sometimes Turki aims too high for his own good. I could sense the frustration, that soon became counter productive, so I offered that we take a break and just talk for a second. We ended up chatting about the differences in culture between the US and Saudi Arabia, specifically focusing on music. He told me all about some Arabic music that he likes and why he finds it hard to listen to popular music here in the US. He said he thinks it is frustrating how American songs will have happy beats with sad lyrics, and vice versa. I thought this was humorous and something I had never really thought about before. I wrote down a list of artists for him to listen to and plan on talking about them during our next meeting.
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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