The World in a 1-bedroom Flat.

Last Friday during the day we had our revision for the group project we’re working on. (A revision is a progress check and review before the final projects are due.) Ellen, a Korean girl, invited the 5 girls in the group over to her house for dinner afterward. I had only slept 3 hours the night before, and my roommates were having a party at our house later in the evening so I really wanted to go home and get a few hours sleep before our party. Instead I went with the girls to Ellen’s.

When I got there I was glad I hadn’t skipped out. I could tell from my first moments inside her apartment that Ellen had carefully planned for us, with wine and glasses already on the table. We found out later that she had stayed up until 3 am cooking the night before.

We ate a mixture of Italian and Korean food while the Italian version of Mariah Carey's "Hero" played in the background. One thing that amazed me was how much pop culture we all share. We talked for awhile about music, and everyone was in the know. I was the most out-of-the-loop because Americans don't usually hear all the world artists. (By the way, have any of you out there heard of Faithless? My British friend was amazed that I had never heard of them before I arrived here. My introduction to them was a 3-hour video marathon on Italian TV the first week I was here.)

When working in our group, most things happen in English, but for this party there was an additional person who speaks only Korean and Italian. So she would speak in Italian and the Turkish girl or the Taiwanese girl would translate it to English. Or sometimes I would interpret as much as I could myself. We talked, we laughed…our group finally had fun together. Overall there’s been a tension amongst us, and that night it was finally gone.

The dinner, for me, was a knitting together of our lives and our hearts. (yes, cheesy but it was very meaningful for me.) There were 6 women in the room, all from different countries except the 2 from Korea. The conversation went from English to Italian to Korean and back again. Even with all the translation back and forth, we all understood one another. The topics were the things of life and he heart, and I left feeling closer to the girl who spoke the least English than anyone else in the room.


My favorite moment of the evening:
Ellen bought 3 kinds of beer Beck’s, Heineken, and Budweiser. I took a Beck’s, and I said something how I wouldn’t drink the Budweiser. LuLu, who’s Taiwanese asked about the Budweiser, I told her it was American, and she wanted to try it. I can’t explain how much it made me laugh when I saw LuLu, this really fashion forward Taiwanese girl drinking a can of Budweiser, a beer that reminds me of family Midwestern get-togethers. It was an odd cultural moment.