A while back, I attended the CIES open
house. It was awesome! I have to say, I wasn’t expecting to have
nearly as much fun as I did.
Sarah and I arrived a little bit after
the opening ceremony and immediately set about finding the buffet. We
hunkered down with our overfull plates and enjoyed some delicious
international food – baba ganoush, hummus, dolmas…As we all know,
food is 90% of culture, so this was a very instructive learning
experience for us.
We met up with Ben, who told us that
the scene upstairs was ‘bumpin’ and that we ought to save room
for more multicultural foodstuffs. On the second floor, a weird
blend of smells and overlapping dance songs came wafting to us down
the hall. We checked out the Middle Eastern room first, where we
were greeted by Jsassas with some candied dates and M.E. coffee. I
got to meet Sarah’s tutee Ali for the first time, but it was hard
to make much conversation over the Arabic music and the sounds of 15
Kuwaitis shouting and dancing.
The scene in the other rooms was
similarly bumping. Especially in the Brazil and Africa rooms. The
Africa room was great, lots of dancing, but the students were so
absorbed in their own party that there wasn’t really much to do but
stand around and watch them. The Brazil room in my opinion was the
highlight of the event. The coffee and sweets were fantastic, and the
Brazilian students were teaching some of us less rhythmically gifted
(ie white) folks how to dance. I met Sarah’s CP Isabella, who
guided through the many presentations in the room. She also told us
about the beautiful architecture and history of her own region,
‘Minas Gerais,’ which in Portugese means Black Gold. But with
Isabela’s accent, Sarah and I thought she was saying Blood Goat, so
we keep saying, incredulously, “Blood Goat? Seriously? That’s
intense.” But I guess she thought we were saying black gold so she
just kept nodding excitedly, “yes, yes, [blood goat].’ It wasn’t
until after that we realized our mistake.
In short, Sarah and I had a great time,
learned a lot, and ate way too much.
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