Christiana CP#4

Date/Time: May 22, 2017; 7:00-8:30 P.M.
Location: Lake Ella 
Topic: The Election process, family relations, marriage, careers, etc. 
Cultural and/or linguistic topics you and your partner learned: focused on the cultural differences between Kuwait and the US, learned about relationships, jobs and government in each other's cultures. 

For our fourth conversation partner meeting I picked Nasar up at the Campus Circle Study Center and we headed to Lake Ella. The weather was a little overcast but luckily it stayed dry while we were there. We walked around the lake a few times before settling down at a picnic table, where we sat and started chatting about our weekends and wound up talking about how the president was in Saudi Arabia, which neighbors Kuwait. Nasar then asked about elections, how they work, where you vote, voting age, and if I had voted. I gave him a condensed run down of this election and spoke about how I actually voted for the very first time in Tallahassee when I was a freshman in college. He was very interested to find all of this out and gave me a brief description his "Emir" which would the Kuwait's equivalent of a president, though it sounds more similar to a 'royal family'. He then asked me a few questions about how marriage works here in the US and I explained the cultural norms of dating, engagement, and weddings. I learned that in Kuwait, women live with their parents until a husband asks her family for her hand in marriage at which point, if she accepts, she will get married to the man in question and then move in with him. Women do not live alone at any point in their lives, which I found very interesting. At this point the he sun had gone down and the bugs had started to bite so we decided to head out and while we were walking back to the car we talked about getting jobs here in the US, and how it was much harder to find well paying, and secure jobs here than it was in Kuwait. As we drove home we talked about our potential future plans and the role our countries of residence would play in them. This was probably our most fluid meeting, there were very few lulls in our conversation and I could tell he was getting more comfortable with asking some of the cultural questions he had thought of since moving here.