#5

I just got home from dinner at Tomukun (Korean BBQ) with three members of my circle - if you haven’t been yet, go immediately - and all in all I’m feeling glad to have done something with the group outside of our normal Friday meetings. Not only was the food great, but it was also really nice to spend some unstructured time with each other, apart from the inescapable facilitator/group dynamic that can’t help but creep into our chat cafe sessions in a small way. I noticed that we more easily fell into one on one conversations, and that a lot more Chinese was being spoken between the three than usual (which was awesome, I had hoped this wouldn’t feel like just another circle to us). We laughed at my dismal chopstick usage, cooked and ate an obscene amount of meat, and hopefully they all had as fun of a time as myself. It seemed that all three - as well as the two who could not make it tonight - were excited to have tried a new restaurant in Ann Arbor and hoped we could do something similar in the future. To that end, I’m planning on dragging them to Madras Masala (most of them have not tried Indian food yet, but all of them want to) sometime in the next couple of weeks. 

TL;DR? - food is a universally beautiful thing and you should totally go eat some with your group. 

Apart from this, our regular meetings have been going smoothly - last week we met at Amer’s and yesterday at Sweeting - and almost always we end up touching on cultural differences/questions that we have for one another. And sometimes, their questions seem to seek my advice on particular difficulties one or more of them may be experiencing with life in the US. For example, tonight we talked a little bit about table manners/what is considered rude (my table manners are perhaps lacking…but I hope I steered them in the right direction nonetheless), and one less benign problem that has come up recently in conversation among a couple people has been a shared difficulty finding housing for next year. I suppose, with this problem and with any others, I have taken the approach of first trying to communicate my own experience of the issue, and then telling them what I know others have experienced or sending them links to information I hope will be helpful. 

On an unrelated note, something I am thinking about after reading Emma's 4th blog post is the possibility of centering one of our meetings (especially as we get closer to finals) around discussing stress in our lives and the different resources on campus related to mental health/stress relief/etc. We always start our meetings talking about the stressful things we had to deal with during the week (our meetings are on Fridays, so everyone is winding down), but I feel like it would definitely be worth talking about stress in a less small talk-y way, and about and how isolating schoolwork/the life of a college kid can get. I guess I just hope I can accomplish this as just another member of the group (which is to say without being too didactic)...we shall see