After a lot of complications, I finally met with my conversation partner for the first time on April 4th at Railroad Square for First Friday. Her name is Carolina Quintero from Columbia. She spoke pretty good English on text messages, but did warn me that her texting abilities was much better than her actual proficiencies in person. We met up around 5pm at Railroad Square and her sister dropped her off. From what I learned about her, she came up from Columbia in December of this year to FSU, just as her older sister did. I think her sister spoke a bit more English than she did, and may or may not have transitioned through the CIES program herself. She also has two brothers, both of which are older and live in Columbia still.
As we were walking around Railroad Square, we spoke briefly about our families and what surprised her most about the United States. One of the funny things I think she said was that Americans valued dogs a lot. As an example, she said that she thought it was odd that people slept with their dogs and even put them in "dog hotels" when they left on vacation. I told her about the kennel my dad uses, which gives you the option of letting your dog watch TV in their kennel room. I was disappointed to learn that she had actually been to Railroad Square during First Friday before, but this time they the "blessing of the bikes" event which several dominations of religions blessed the safety of a parade of bikes and their riders. Overall it was a quick hour, Carolina's English is certainly not great, but for someone who started the language in December, she had a very large receptive vocabulary and I think she will be able to adapt to the language very quickly given a college career in the United States.
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