Today was all about holidays. I’m really excited that I finally found a way to maintain steady conversation and teach her about American culture at the same time. It was so strange to think that not everyone celebrates Easter or Halloween or Thanksgiving. But it was fun explaining it to her!
We started with Mardi Gras. I asked her if she did anything for Mardi Gras and she just gave me this puzzled look and repeated the phrase. I got out my laptop and tried to begin explaining what this big festival was all about. I showed her a map of the United States and pointed out Louisiana and New Orleans, telling her that this is where the main festival is held. We then googled pictures of the Mardi Gras floats which she found endlessly fascinating. I showed her the Mardi Gras beads and she had an “ah hah!” moment. She had seen people around campus wearing beads but was clueless to their meaning.
After giving her some information about Mardi Gras, I thought it might be helpful for her to know about Ash Wednesday. I went to a private Christian high school with almost no practicing Catholics, so when I came to TCU, I was shocked by this practice. I remember walking through the BLUU last year on Ash Wednesday and seeing so many people with the ash on their foreheads. So I wanted to fill her in on the practice. I began telling her about the black on people’s foreheads and she immediately starting smiling and nodding and patting my arm. She kept repeating, “I thought it mistake!” I told her that it was intentional and that throughout the day she will see increasingly more people with the ash on their forehead. Once again, google images proved to be a wonderful tool.
I’m not sure how much of my explanation she understood. She had no idea what a Catholic was so I tried my best to tell her about different types of Christianity and why Catholics were different from what she believed. She is a Christian but more specifically, attends a Bible Church and had no idea there were other sects of Christianity. It’s really hard to explain the idea of the Pope to someone who doesn’t speak English and knows nothing about Catholicism. I was pretty shocked that she didn’t know who the Pope was. I always knew that Asia had it’s own religious beliefs but I didn’t realize it was so far removed from the West that they didn’t even study it.
Eventually we moved to talking about Easter. I explained to her that kids have an Easter egg hunt completely with baskets and candy. We were both sad that we are too old to participate. ☹
After Easter came Thanksgiving. She was in the United States for Thanksgiving this year and from what she told me it sounded traditional. She said they ate lots of food and had a turkey. It was nice bringing this up because I forget sometimes that America is the only country that celebrates Thanksgiving!
Lastly was Halloween. We looked on google at a huge selection of costumes and she was really excited. We laughed at the different costumes people put their dogs in and smiled at baby costumes. It was interesting seeing what characters she recognized, like Scream. We ended our day looking at my facebook pictures from my Halloween.
This was probably my favorite meeting with Shinhye. For the first time, there were no awkward pauses and we even shared a lot of laughs. It also wasn’t artificial conversation, but instead flowed naturally. I feel like I actually bonded with her. This time it was less of homework and more like just hanging out with a friend, and that’s a big deal for me. My main complaint about this assignment is that if I’m going to devote an hour of my week every week to have a conversation with someone, there are so many people I’d love to do it with. At this point, I talk to Shinhye more than I talk to some of my closest friends, and that has always bothered me. But with this last meeting, I didn’t feel that, so things must be on track.
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