Jaime CP2

Last Saturday Hassan invited a bunch of people over to his place for a dinner with the Saudis and Kuwaitis. The evening was truly memorable with food and fun. Camille and her roommate sang for everyone, Carlos played guitar, and not to be outdone… Nic, Francis, and I taught the cha cha slide and the Macarena, because let’s be honest someone had to do it. We learned the Saudi version of the depka (they call this dance a different name), Hassan showed us pictures of a group of his friends dancing at a wedding in Saudi Arabia and gave us a short history of the dance.
Later in the evening the guys busted out a hookah (expected) and the card game ‘bullshit’ (not so expected). At this point the personalities of the guys started to come out. One of my favorite parts of the game is Hussein yelling “bulllshiet!” loudly at a befuddled Rashid who would stick out his tongue and bob his head sideways while chanting “bullshit” at Hussein in protest. Nic and I were in stitches. I noticed during the middle of the game that Hussein would blatantly look at poor Rashid’s cards and when I pointed this out he grinned at me and said, “I’m not cheating, he’s showing me.”

I have to admit I was surprised and impressed. One of my best friends is Egyptian, and Hassan and co. defy the constraints that she says are normally placed on young people within Middle Eastern culture. I.e. Hookah. When Heidy and I go out to hookah she will play down that she is Egyptian, because in Egypt it is still frowned upon for women to smoke. She also mentioned that there are usually tensions between Sunnis and Shias. While we were over at dinner, Hassan surprised me by mentioning that the guys were mixed between Sunnis and Shias- that he was a Shia. (This surprised me even more because Saudi Arabia is predominantly Sunni as their King has a claim of being a descendent of the Umayyad family. Although he is from an area that has the highest concentration of Shias) I’ve heard Hassan explain that because he and his friends are in America, they want to live in sync with American culture, and that although they are used to a different way of doing things, they respect American culture and are eager to spend time with their new TEFL friends.

Good answer, because as far as I can tell all of us “TEFL friends” adore them.