CESL Experience

The cultural identity experience at CESL really opened my eyes about some things. I thought that when I started school here at the U of A, it was scary. I had no idea how very lucky I was to be here, rather than somewhere else, especially a place where I couldn’t speak my native language. At CESL, I spoke with a girl from Korea named Hedy. She was a funny and nice person and I was happy to be paired up with her. She told me about how people in Korea seem to get very angry, but they have a way of getting calm very easily. That is something I can value, because I’ve lived with people that should take similar advice. What I found interesting was that she had been in Arizona for about a month now, yet she hadn’t tried any Mexican food. I did have to tell her though that cilantro is sometimes used. Apparently some Asian cultures also use cilantro and she had specifically told me that she hated it. When comparing this to our culture identity reading, I found that the main character and all the students in CESL were in a similar situation. All, after travelling to a foreign country, had to take tremendous amounts of classes to be able to speak a foreign language. While the character in the reading only had to cross a border, it showed the dedication that the character had to understanding another way of life. I believe that these students in CESL too have to have some sort of dedication to learning about our culture; otherwise they would not want to put themselves in such an unfamiliar place far from home.