Meredith CP #1 IE

On January 15th I met with Ramin's listening class for the first time for an intercultural exchange activity. I met with three different groups of students and we talked from a list of questions they had prepared. Each group was pretty different. I don't remember their names, but my first group was a guy and a girl from Saudi Arabia. She asked most of the questions and was very talkative, and had questions about cultural differences mostly. She talked a lot about how friendly and open everyone has been in America, including strangers, which doesn't happen in Saudi Arabia. The next group was a girl from Japan and a boy Mohammed from Kuwait. Their questions were a lot different- she asked what my pet peeves were, and she really wanted to know how American students partied. They don't get to interact with American students much, much less attend parties, so I explained a lot of the social aspect of college to them. With the third group, it was two girls one named Shahd and the other was from Venezuela, I am not sure what her name was. The three of us talked about adoption mostly. Adoption is very common in the United States, much more common than most other countries, which I did not know. They talked about how in their countries it was actually looked down upon, whereas in America it is looked upon highly. From there we started talking about pregnancy, their career tracks, and Orlando. Shahd was going to Orlando for the weekend so we talked about shopping there and Universal Studios.
I really enjoyed the experience, and am excited for next week. It was interesting to hear about their home countries and to tell them things about America. There are a lot of nuances about American culture that are harder to learn about, so it was fun to talk about that. We were definitely able to learn from each other.