Conversation 2

            For my second conversation with Giovanka, we met outside 1873 for coffee. The weather was so beautiful it would have practically been a sin to sit inside. She greeted me with a kiss on the cheek, something she said was customary in Brazil, and we just started chatting away! We began our conversation by talking about our weeks. She is in 4 classes all about speaking English, so her life is all about reading, writing, talking, and listening, while I am a biology major so most of my time is just memorizing, memorizing, memorizing! I gave her a few tips and hints for biology because next year, she’ll hopefully be taking it too! I can’t wait to help her out next year- I told her she can have all of my notes because I can’t imagine how hard it would be to take biology in a language besides my native language!

            As the conversation progressed, she began telling me about her weekend. She told me she went to a party with her brother, a sophomore finance major here at TCU, and had the shock of her life. She said she had never seen anything like those girls before. She reminded me of myself the first time I went out- just completely shocked. She said that in Brazil people the girls were more conservative than the girls she saw that night, and if they were dressed in short clothes, they acted properly so as not to look trashy. She also said that the dancing that she saw at that party was the kind of dancing that only the really poor, trashy people do and they immediately would get kicked out of parties for doing it in public. In my head I couldn’t help but giggle when she was talking about how shocked she was because I was that same way just a few months ago.

            She proceeded to tell me about all kinds of funny stories that have happened to her while living in the dorms- about how she can’t walk in the Colby stairwell late at night or go to the bathrooms there either because she doesn’t know what she will come across. I am just so glad that she still loves America after all of the culture shocks that she has experienced.

            We then began talking about spring break and, somehow, from there got to the conversation of different countries. She has never been out of Brazil except for being in America. I thought that was very interesting because I thought that people outside America traveled to different surrounding countries like we travel to states, so I found that very interesting. She asked me where I’d visited and then we began looking up pictures of different countries on our phones. It was really interesting to hear what she had to say about all the different countries because, through ESL, she had met people from all over the world and knew so much about different cultures-it’s crazy!

            As our conversation drew to a close, we had come up with so many fun things that we want to do together this semester that I think these 6 conversation meetings won’t be enough to get them all done! Who would have thought this little assignment would lead me to make friends with someone so cool!