Catalina - CP #1

So it’s about time I stopped being such a bum and actually wrote about my Conversational Partners. I was actually surprised the day of the first meeting to know that I was going to have two of them. I thought it would be more of a one-on-one thing! However, at arrival at the lounge at CIES I knew it was meant to be of a more informal nature. I’m guessing it’s up to each partner to decide to what level you want to take the conversation. At arrival Rashed was there and we spoke about bikes since it’s both of our means of transport to campus. Hanan arrived very soon after and, although I was reluctant to mix them since I don’t know if it’s something accepted in their culture, we ended up sitting together. I asked them a little bit about their backgrounds to also try to understand what language level they were at. Both of them had a pretty good grasp of passive English but struggled a lot more with actually producing the answers, although they managed to communicate pretty well. Rashed was into technology and Hanan wanted to talk girly stuff so it was a bit like a Ping-Pong match for a while. Thank god Taylor came in and her conversational partner wasn’t there, so she sat with us as group that eventually sort of broke off into two pairs. Keeping the conversation at a basic vocabulary level made things easier with Hanan, so she could talk about what she knew how to say. This has changed in the following meetings, I think for the better!