On Jan. 18th, my conversation partner, Sulaiman, and I met for the first time at the Paper Fox Café on Pensacola. Sulaiman is from Saudi Arabia, and while his English was not bad, there were a few times when we were not quite able to understand one another and had to take out Google Translate, and even then we would still get confused. We talked about pop culture, food, historical celebrities in our countries, such as the USA’s most famous presidents and Saudi Arabia’s most famous royal leaders, and hobbies. There was more than one moment where we were each talking about something while the other thought it was about something else, but we were able to understand one another in the end. So far, Sulaiman likes his classes and Tallahassee, and plans to be in town for a while. I am excited to see how he will grow and his English skills will improve!
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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