Blog Post #4

I wanted to start off by talking about my chat cafe this week. This week's chat cafe was fun and seemed to be entertaining for everyone. My group now consists of 3-4 regular attendees and we now meet at Espresso Royale almost every week, just for ease of finding the location. We actually ended up making things more personal in that we talked less about formal topics and more about what was going on in our lives. We also talked about what we did over fall break and how midterms went. I decided to have a list of questions prepared for the cafe which actually ended up making our conversation seem much more lighthearted. For example I asked things like: what is the craziest thing you've ever done?, where do you see yourself in 5 years? if you could change anything about yourself what would it be?. Although these questions may seem as though they were like interview questions or maybe too personal, it really broke the ice with our group and allowed us all to become closer. We all shared our aspirations, previous experiences, and noticed that each of us interpreted the questions differently. 

In terms of cultural and linguistic differences, we actually ended up discussing this both at the end of my last chat cafe and also at early on in the first few meetings. We talked about how everyone perceives Americans and what is different about the way they are treated by strangers here vs. at home. I said to them that they should feel free to express anything that they may perceive, even if it may seem harsh or stereotypical. One participant mentioned that it is often that American students will be friendly and want to get to know the international student, but that there is no friendship beyond that. For example, in the beginning of the term people will show you around, ask you about where you are from, etc, but eventually people seem self absorbed and do not seem to care much about being friendly. Many participants resonated with this sentiment. I would actually like to discuss cultural differences in a more structured manner with my group but mostly this topic ends up showing up organically in any conversation that we have. 

I think we could definitely touch more on linguistic differences and also similarities. It would be interesting to hear what participants have to say about them. I feel comfortable talking about cultural and linguistic differences because I think we can all learn how we perceive and think about things in such different ways. It would be fun to have an activity where we talked about different mannerisms and how they are different in each country or place that we are all from. One thing that was really helpful in structuring this discussion for me was the infographic article by Liu. I ended up showing these graphics to my group and we discussed only a few of them but it really sparked conversation about whether the participants resonated with these stereotypes or not. We only had time to talk about some of them but they were all very interested to talk more about them, especially because we have a mixture of both Germans and Chinese students in our cafe. 

Next week we are planning to have a small potluck and I would like to structure our conversation around cultural and linguistic differences and similarities as much as I can!