Conversation Partner: First encounter

I met with my conversation partner for the first time just over a week ago. He is a 27 year old fro Saudi Arabia named Mansour. When Mansour and I first sat down at the bookstore I found that he had many interesting things to share and I found it intriguing that he was dressed like any typical American in jeans and a t-shirt.

He moved to the United States in July of 2011 and is now learning English formally for the first time. He told me how he used movies and TV shows to learn as much english as he could before he moved over to America. We started by talking about his family and siblings, he lives in the same house as his parents and his grandparents (something quite common in Saudi culture) and is the middle child of the 10 children. He spoke about how growing up with such a big family is quite common in Saudi Arabia and it is simply apart of the culture there.

Mansour is the only member of his family to travel to the United States and the only one formally learning english. I quickly inquired what his purpose for learning english was and he answered that finding a job in Saudi Arabia is nearly impossible now without a college degree and fluent english. I was quite amazed, thinking that a country with Arabic as the national language would have nearly all jobs requiring knowledge of the english language. He said that not even five years ago you could easily find a job only being able to speak arabic.

Mansour's ultimate goal is to learn english and then move on to getting a college degree in business (specifically human resources) from a college in San Antonio, Texas. He told me though that learning english outside the classroom here is hard because the only interaction he has with the language and native speakers is at restaurants. I am glad that I will be able to help him in this respect by giving him someone to speak to in english.

Here are just a few interesting facts I learned about Mansour:

• He loves to play Fifa on the Playstation 3
• He bought a copy of Call Of Duty for many of his brothers (you can't get this is Saudi Arabia)
• He thought Texans would ride horses around like the wild west
• He loves watching movies
• He loves watching soccer

Library Research Day 1

The Time Magazine I read through was the issue from May 21st, 1928 just 2 days (and 64 years) before my actual birthday. While reading through the magazine I found some truly interesting things. I found it interesting to compare life in 1928 to life now through the differences in writing style, advertisements and content of this Time magazine.  

First off, one small thing I noticed was that all of the letters to the editor were addressed to "Sirs:" which I thought was odd at first but then realized what time period I was reading. Addressing the editors and writers at Time as 'sirs' was quite commonplace in 1928 as women did not work for publications. Another example of this that seemed bizarre to me was the references to fraternity life in a publication such as Time. I found this odd because I have never read about fraternities in a national publication before. The article was talking about the renewed prestige of the Phi Beta Kappa fraternity at Harvard, and the reason behind it being the then recent announcement that some business executives only wanted to hire Phi Beta Kappa alumnus. 

The second section that I dwelled on was the Science section. I thought it would be interesting to see what kinds of technology was being released and announced at this time. As it turns out there were a few inventions that stood out to me because in a form they are still with us today. The toot-light was announced in this issue of Time and it was the first introduction of a three-colored traffic light. There was one big difference from what we know of today though. These traffic lights were pre-timed based on traffic patterns and changed through the colors showing red as stop and a green light as go. You could do one more thing though, each traffic light was equipped with a telephone transmitter, and when you honked your horn the light would change from red to green for you and stay green for ten seconds. I found this invention to be an interesting one to say the least, I can see why this invention did not stick to the wall per say but it was a great idea none the less. Another invention was listed shortly after the toot-light and it was introducing the idea of self-winding wrist watches, watches that used your regular wrist motion to be sure that they kept the correct time. 

I found it intriguing that there were times before some of these inventions. For example, I have a hard time imagining life without automatic traffic lights that use Red, Yellow and Green, yet there was a time not even 70 years ago when that was reality. 

The advertisements were by far my favorite part of reading through this 65 year old magazine. I noticed that I was able to draw many conclusions about culture and general way of life during the year of 1928 by simply reading through the advertisements.  There were even some advertisements that I nearly found comical because of the lack of relevance that they have to our society and culture now. For example, one of the first advertisements that was for natural gas to be used for heating. To me it seemed silly that this company was trying to convince me that natural gas was the best way to heat your household because it is simply commonplace now-a-days. I also saw an interesting advertisement for what appeared to be a voice recording machine that would allow you to record memos and play them back for people. It was supposed to revolutionize business. 

One of the most interesting reads I found in this issue of the magazine was an article about John D. Rockefeller. The article spoke to his philosophy on how an individual should handle money as well as what a typical day of his was like. This gave me even more insight into what life was like in the 20's. For example, Rockefeller's day included time to be leisurely driven around the city always going over 35 mph, something that is one a foreign concept to us now. For one thing, driving over 35 mph is normal given that most posted speed limits are 30+ mph, and driving is much more of a chore now rather than a luxury. I also drew the conclusion that not many people in the US had access to cars because the richest man in the country was taking time out of his day to be sure he enjoyed the fact that he had a car to ride in. 

Finally, I noticed that the writing style in this magazine was different from that of today's magazines. It seemed much more sophisticated and academic than the fifth grade reading level writing of today.