A few days before Thanksgiving, Vera and I decided to meet up for the fifth time. Rather than going to our usual place in Union Grounds though, Dan Arndst and I coordinated to have a “double date” with our conversation partners. We talked a week beforehand about setting something up, simply because both our conversation partners seemed to be friends. Vera and Tristan had each tagged along to the other’s conversation partner meetings, so we thought it would be fun to just have a group meeting! Initially we expected to have Tristan play piano for us, but ended up just getting a nice afternoon snack at Market Square instead.
After Dan and I met up with Tristan at a table in the main area of the cafeteria, Vera texted me to ask if it would be okay to bring another one of her friends. What a social butterfly! Sure enough she tagged along with her friend named Amy, who is another Intensive English Program student. When I first met Amy, she seemed to just be a normal foreign student like Vera, but it turns out that she was far from the normal student. She actually got married a year ago and commutes to TCU from her home. Her husband owns a frozen yogurt shop nearby, and she seems to be very proud of it. It turns out that Vera and Amy have several classes together, which is how they know each other. Amy is from Seoul, South Korea, so their only common language is English, which I thought was very cool.
After chatting for a bit and getting acquainted with one another, I noticed that Vera had a large band-aid on the backside of her hand. I asked what had happened, and it turns out that she had just received a sports injury about thirty minutes before meeting up with us. She and Amy decided that they wanted to try the rock climbing wall in the TCU Recreation Center, and did it together. After struggling to ascend it, Vera slipped and cut her hand on one of the handholds. We all exchanged laughs about the simple mistake, but only because I told her I probably would have done the same thing.
After that, we got into the topic of social media applications other than Facebook and Twitter. Dan and I described new programs like Snapchat and Instagram, and gave the three IEP students a couple demonstrations on our phones. I thought it was unusual that they had never heard of these popular applications, but I guess it’s not that strange since they are mostly limited to America and Europe. After we showed them though, Vera created an Instagram which she says she wants to start using. The main topic of discussion though was our individual plans for Thanksgiving. As I had expected to hear, neither Vera, Tristan, nor Amy had any plans for the holiday. They were all just staying local, but said that they would most likely spend the day with their friends in the TCU area who were also staying in the neighborhood. Dan and I talked a bit about our own family traditions, which fascinated our conversation partners.
Finally, our conversation was stopped short because everybody had somewhere to be later that afternoon, but we talked about each other’s plans for the future after graduating from school. The consensus with all five of us was that we wanted to work and live within America, simply because of how great the opportunities are here. Everybody mentioned that they liked being near a major city, so it will be interesting to see how our individual plans work out in the time to come. After saying goodbye to Amy and Tristan, I gave Vera a hug and we parted ways. I know our meeting after Thanksgiving will be bittersweet, but only because it will be my last time seeing Vera for the semester.
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