Kasper - CP 1

After class on Thursday, I was finally able to meet my conversation partner, Fahd, after some rounds of phone tag. We met at Starbucks on Tennessee Street and from our previous phone conversations he told me he was in Tallahassee studying English with his wife. I arrived at Starbucks and he was there with his cousin, Alaa. Both of them are form Yemeni descent but live in Saudi Arabia. Neither of them has been to the US before but they are excited to be here and want to visit bigger cities. Fahd has been here for a month but can understand much of what I say. I don’t know if it showed but I was nervous and in the beginning it almost felt like a blind date. All of us were looking for things we might have in common. Once all of our initial “jitters” subsided, we talked about many different things, starting with the usual school conversation about majors, moved on to family and relationship status. Both of them are married and Fahd’s wife is pregnant, she is due in a month. I asked him how he felt about his son being born in the US and he said very excited about dual citizenship. He asked if I was born in the US and I told him I was born in Nicaragua but neither of them had any idea were that was so I ended up drawing a map on newspaper because they were not very familiar with the geography of central America, besides Mexico. I asked them why they came to Tallahassee and they explained there are many Saudi’s at FSU. Apparently, the Saudi government pays for its citizens to come study English in the US, sounds like a good deal to me. Overall the experience was great, both of them are very accesible Looks like I will have two conversation partners for the price of one since Fahd is more comfortable with Alaa being there. We decided to meet somewhere else next time since neither of them drinks coffee.