Today I was in another class talking about food. At least this time it had popular ethnic foods in America as its context. It mentioned Italian, Greek, Chinese, Mexican, German, and Japanese food. There were a couple of students that recognized some of them, including a girl that had gone to an Italian restaurant in Saudi Arabia. Still, I couldn’t quite explain how much I miss Mexican food, SIGH. Anyway, we talked about different types of food here and other places. Fast food came up and just for fun, I asked them what a hamburger is made of. Predictably, some of them said ham, not that they knew what that was. I informed them that ham was a type of pork and got blank stares, so I used the Arabic word “hhanzeer,” and got a unified gasp out of them. Some looked more than a little worried, so I quickly informed them that all hamburgers are made of beef and everyone relaxed again… I spent the last 5 minutes of class going over common foods in the west that are haraam for them. They learned about pork, ham, and bacon. I also remembered that alcohol is used in a decent amount of desserts and other dishes so I told them about rum, vodka, tequila (mmmm, California pizza kitchen’s tequila lime chicken fettucini sounds REALLY good right now), brandy, Bailiey’s, and Grand Marnier. Man, that class made me really hungry…
The next class was hilarious. I had read the lesson the night before and prepared myself. It was all about some guy named Tom talking about his wedding day. Ooog, that took some explaining. It was really about the wedding reception, they didn’t talk about the actual wedding at all. The part where he talked about his mother dancing with his bride’s father took a little while to explain… Anyway, I did what I could and then I told them they could ask me other questions. They ended up learning about the wedding party, how the actual wedding goes, the honeymoon, bridesmaids, the Best Man, etc. They (well the guys) had a lot of questions about men only being able to marry one woman, I had one student with two wives! All of them seemed to be relieved that they could get divorced and remarried… Anyway, it was interesting, I think I managed to explain things pretty well, I hope they don’t think we’re too weird:-)