Conversational Partner #3

For my third meeting with Hussain, I wanted to do something besides just meet and talk at some place on campus. During our past meeting, we had talked about fishing a lot, and the weather was great so I decided that we should try to go to the Trinity River and fish. He had a pole, but I didn't, so when we were texting we were debating doing something other than fishing. Ultimately, the warm weather won us over and we went fishing. Judging from what he had told me about his fishing experiences in Saudi Arabia and the pictures of the fish that he had caught, I considered him to be a talented and knowledgeable fisherman. He talked about how we needed to get some "food" for our bait since I didn't have any, so we stopped at a gas station on the way to the river. We bought some Jack Links sausage for bait, and then drove to the river. He lived at the Fairfield Inn off of University for his first week in the US, so he was pretty familiar with the area around the river. We teamed up to put the hook on the pole and then put the sausage on the hook. The pole that he had was a generic one, but I was not familiar with how the reel worked. I was struggling to cast the line, so Hussain threw the line most of the time. Before we had left to go fishing, Hussain said that he didn't think we would catch anything, and he was right. We did have a few bites, however. Fishing wasn't what was important about our outing though, the conversation was.

As usual, our conversation included a various number of topics. He told me about his fall break trip, which I was looking forward to hearing about. He said that the hiking trip was the best trip of his life. He found the hiking to be difficult, but he greatly enjoyed the company of those that accompanied him on the trip. He talked about a trip to the Grand Canyon that TCU offers during the winter time and about how he might go. The large cost was making him reconsider, however.

After reviewing fellow classmates' blogs about their Saudi Arabian conversational partners, I had some additional questions for Hussain. After our first meeting, I was under the impression that Hussain did not want to return to his country after his time in the US. My classmates' blogs made me think that Saudi Arabians stayed near their parents after moving out, so I decided to ask him to talk more about it. He said that he planned to return and live near his parents, unlike his sister who lives in Ohio. He explained how his brothers and sisters wanted to repay their parents for taking care of them when they were children. This was a typical occurrence in Saudi Arabia, which put an end to my confusion.

We were talking about what we had coming up in the next few weeks, which led to him telling me about an English qualifying test that he had in a week. I had a hard time understanding exactly what he meant, but he talked about how he had to pass this test before he could go on to study English at the university. I wasn't sure if this was the next step of the IEP program, but he said that everyone that was in class with him had already taken the test.

One of the last things we talked about was something that I found to be humorous. We were talking about his sister and how her husband was moving here from Saudi Arabia when I decided to ask if he had a girlfriend. I was relatively surprised by his response, which was that he did not, and that having a girlfriend was a waste of time. They cost a lot of money and took up too much time, according to him. He began talking about how a girl texted him a lot when he initially moved here and seemed interested in starting a relationship. Hussain, however, did not want to have any part of a relationship and made that known to her. When I asked this question, I had no idea to expect, and I was definitely surprised by what he said.