Fourth Meeting 10/18

            Denily and I had our fourth meeting the other day (actually, it was technically our fifth meeting, but seriously, who’s counting?! Oh wait….). Either way, we had another good conversation about various topics. First, we followed up from the last meeting on the election in Venezuela. Unfortunately (spoiler alert!), as I already said, Chavez was reelected. What a bummer. I asked Denily why he keeps being elected. Chavez definitely has a negative reputation in most of the world, in my evaluation, so I was surprised that he won again. According to Denily, he gets all of his votes from the poorer population, which is very large. Apparently, his presidency hasn’t helped many of them get out of poverty either, because they keep voting for him. Denily was upset, but obviously can’t do anything to change it at this point.

            We haven’t been able to meet for about two weeks because of conflicts in our schedules, so we caught up on what the other had been doing. Denily had gone to Houston to be with some friends there, while I had just stayed here.

            Denily and all the international students had their midterms last week as well, and she said she did very well! Being an ESL student sounds like it would get somewhat repetitive eventually though; Denily says now they will basically do the same thing they did the first half of the semester, but only with different books. In the second half of the semester, they will be reading Life of Pi. I had the misfortune of reading this book years ago, in my freshman year of high school. As I recall, I had to read about 200 pages of boredom before actually getting anywhere. The dislike of the book may have just come from lack of maturity back them, but I still have clear memories of disliking the book. Maybe I would like it better if I read it again; however, Denily so far doesn’t like it either, so maybe I was correct all along.

            So far, it has been cool to hang out with someone from a different country just to talk. Another thing we talked about was Denily’s former exposure to the United States. It was no surprise that before coming to TCU, Denily had only been to Florida, where a large Spanish speaking population makes life easy for south and central Americans. She said she had always wanted to go to other places, but had never been able to do this, since she always travels with her family, none of whom speak English, until now. Denily hopes to someday go to many different parts of the country with her English skills as strong as they are already. She is currently trying to convince her family to make plans for a more exciting family vacation elsewhere in the United States.  

            Our fourth meeting was fun, as always. Denily and her friend Norelly (also from Venezuela; in fact, she is Manoj’s conversation partner) signed up for some kind of gym class at the Rec, so she left to go do that at the end of our meeting. We’ll meet again next week!