This tutoring session was with Turki from Saudi Arabia. Turki is older than most of the CIES students I have met and is more serious about his work. He never fails to come without a list of topics that he wants to work on. At first I found these requests kind of intimidating as a tutor, but now I appreciate them for they allow me to prepare with materials and to do research on the certain lessons that he wants to focus on before hand. During this session we met at his apartment complex, something I was also a bit intimidated about at first; however, it was a very safe and comfortable environment and actually worked better due to the low level of noise. During this session we focused on prepositions of place as well as practiced using context clues to determine the meaning of a word. Although he likes idioms and funny sayings, he says in certain texts they can be difficult to understand. We worked through a number of different examples as well as with his homework assignment that had already been edited and graded by the teacher. It was a successful lesson and I looked forward to the next one.
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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