For our next meeting, Sulaiman and I met at the Paper Fox café again. We talked about my graduation in less than a week and my plans to go home for a while before I went abroad. I mentioned that I really wanted to go to South America again after having gone to Brazil, and Sulaiman was really interested in learning more about my trip. We talked a lot about our dream trips abroad, especially to Brazil. He was really interested in hiking and seeing the natural sites of the region. Unfortunately, he does not really know anything about Portuguese, so that is a concern of his, but I told him that a lot of people in Brazil speak English, especially in the tourist industry. He did mention, however, that he was really interested in Spanish. Since the Moorish people ruled in Spain for a long time, a lot of Spanish vocabulary is similar to Arabic. Spanish words such as ‘azúcar’ (sugar) and ‘Alcázar’ (any castle built in Spain during Moorish rule) were identical to their Arabic equivalents. This subject was very interesting to me, and Sulaiman and I spent a long time talking about it. This is definitely something I hope to mention to my Saudi Arabian tutee, Somaia!
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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