eap2

Monday, October 4, 2010

Ahmed Altaleb. EAP2b

My group consists of seven respectable, intelligent, educated, and funny members. We usually spend the hour with Derreck and Elizabeth in the classroom. Due to the huge differences in cultures, we find social issues grabs and education grabs our attention. Two social differences we enjoyed talking about were the most shocking to me. One is that Americans do not get married to any of their relatives. Group members showed surprise expression when they know that and so did I. Relatives in the US are like friends and no more. We are not like that in Saudi Arabia and that what makes us surprised. The other thing is that living with your parents after the age of eighteenth is considered to be shameful. I noticed that actually before coming to USA through the movies, but I wanted to see if it is confined to some people or not.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Culture Media EAP2 Mars

In this week, there are 7 people in our group. We talked about American family, Chinese food, and Arabic’s marriage interview in the classroom. In my opinion, I think these three topics would be interesting to others. First, Samantha told us something about American family. For example, most children don’t like to live with their parents after they grow up. Also the female and male are equal, which means they have same right in every area. However, it is different in China. As my family, my grandfather doesn’t need to anything in the house. His duty is only “eat,” drink, and watch the News. My father is the same. Besides. I told my group members a situation: Nowadays, some young Chinese girl watch too much Korean love move, we called “soap movie.” All of these movies talk about how a poor girl meets a rich guy. Poor girl does not need to do anything, because she will “buy” many servants for her.
In addition, we discuss about Arabic’s marriage interview. As Ahmed said: when two families have marriage interview, the man do not have right to decide marriage, but his mother or sister has. If they are married, it will have three wedding parties: to invite woman or man’s family, and to invite their important friends and a few family members.
Finally, I know some of our group members really like Chinese food, so I simply introduce some famous food to them. For example, Chicken is one of popular food in China. Every festival, most of us will cook the chicken in different tastes: soy sauce, salted, roasted, stewing, and fry. All of these are basic. If you go to the restaurant, you may have more tastes. Canton not only is an economic city, but also is a “food” city. The real Chinese food is much better than here. If people visit China for eat, I suggest they go to Canton, southern of China. It will surprise you.

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Wonderful Blog

The First Wonderful Speaking Class
Since I came to CESL, I hope to have a speaking class in which we can communicate with native speakers. This year my hope became real, so I was very happy and interested to have this class. The last Thursday was the first speaking class that was very interesting. During the class, there were many groups and in our group, there were nine members; two native speakers, three Saudis and three from Japan, Korea and China. At that time, we discussed many issues such as gender differences, school system, some American cities and using different ways of communication with friends. The most interesting was different school systems from a country to a country. In America, there are differences between public and private school in terms of uniform; a few public schools have the formal uniform, but students in private schools should have the same uniform. In Korea, the school system nearly is the same as American school system. But in Saudi Arabia, the system is diiferent; student should have the same uniform nevertheless the kinds of school. In addition, we had different opinions about using internet to communicate with friends; most of us said that facebook is the best and others said that skype and hotmail are the best. Moreover, I learned some American cultures, especially formality when speaking to strangers that is very different from our country. That day was wonderful, but class length was very short.
Written by SAEEDA
EAP2 A