Suzanne-CP 4

Saturday night, us Americans returned the favor done to us by our Saudi and Kuwaiti counterparts by hosting a cook-out at Camille's house of love. Almost all of the students from the TEFL class came, as well as our usual pack of Arab friends, some outside friends, and a group of Asian CIES students that I hadn't previously met. There was more than enough food for everyone, which ended up being really great - homemade mac and cheese, Doritos salad, potato salad, chips, cookies, hot dogs, hamburgers, corn on the cob, you name it. The little food battle that Albraa and I had started with each other was easily decided - the Americans win the most delicious food prize! To be fair, we had a lot more help! The Arab guys brought their own meat, bought from the mosque and blessed via halal, which was a cultural experience for us, having those kinds of restrictions. Conversation was easy and free between people from all the differing cultural backgrounds. Even more, a little ongoing language lesson was happening on the chalkboard on Camille's wall - different words and names in English, as well as Arabic, Japanese and Chinese, in some cases. At one point, the Arabs (I apologize for generalizing all of them this way, it's just the easiest way to talk about all eight) got their hookah from home out of the car and we all sat around and enjoyed a little shisha comfort. Personally, I took a lot of enjoyment in watching everyone interact, my friends from outside class, my friends in class, and my foreign friends, even when I wasn't.

Over the course of the night, I talked the most with Albraa and Hassan, two, as I've come to understand, very different souls. Albraa, for instance, likes to joke around and poke fun at his friends; he's a classic charmer who has an air of invulnerability. He seems to appreciate interacting with us, though he shows it less readily. Being my conversation partner, I try to focus on talking to him as much as I can, but sometimes it takes a lot to open him up. We hung out a lot Saturday night, though, talking just the two of us, about subjects ranging from what we all do on Friday nights (he told me a story about getting drunk...a topic which ties into what I'm going to say about Hassan in a moment) to the food. Later, I ended up talking to Hassan a lot. This conversation proved very interesting. Him, Francis and I got started talking about the etiquette and manners of our different cultures. We asked him if we ever did anything that they found offensive and that if we did, to tell us, since we wouldn't otherwise know. Hassan then got to apologizing about some of the things that were brought up in conversation during our hookah-fest at Aladdin's a few weeks back. He seemed concerned that the conversation about dating, romance, sex and marriage that went on between me, my roommate, Albraa and Dary was inappropriate and he was worried that we were viewing him and his friends in a negative light. Francis and I jumped to assuage his worries, explaining that we thought it was okay to talk about those things and were open and willing to discuss them. He said he thought we might say that even if we felt differently, and we did our best to convince him that we would be honest if we ever did feel uncomfortable, and to tell us if any topic made him feel strange. I wonder how much of his worries have to do with the culture he was raised in - do women in Saudi Arabia speak their own minds so readily? I knew at the time that we were treading an interesting line, but I explained to Hassan that all of our open-mindedness and willingness to get deep meant that we could all learn from each other. He's very different from Albraa in this way - where Albraa seems to relish the freedom America gives him, almost to an overindulgent degree, Hassan seems to want to maintain the balance his maturity grants him. Interacting with both people has been a truly enlightening and enjoyable experience for me.