Meet with Bandar #5

     After an incredibly long break period I finally got to meet with my conversation partner again. He has been sick with the flu for over two weeks now and is just now starting to feel a little bit better. He explained to me that he had gone to the hospital and that he had not been going to class lately in order to rest and get better.  For the past two weeks he has simply been staying at home, resting, and eating. I asked him if the hospital helped him at all and he told me that they gave him a prescription but that he would not use the medicine.  Then I asked why. He told me that he did not trust the chemicals and that he preferred vitamins and natural supplements. Although I have been helped greatly by antibiotics and other prescription drugs in the past, I could understand why someone would not want to put that in their body.

      Later in the conversation he told me congratulations on Obama. I laughed because my journalism class just before had been talking about how explosive and negative social media had been on both sides regarding the election. Many people are happy about the results, but many are angered and dismayed too so it seemed ironic that he would be congratulating me without knowing how I felt about the results. It was a nice cognitive shift since lately the election seemed to be such a dramatic thing and, having heard that from him, I was able to take a step back from the party lines and just appreciate having voted this year. I asked him if he had watched or been interested in the election.  He told me that he had not but that if he was going to have an opinion he would vote for the democratic party. When I asked why he explained that he did not like how war focused the republicans seemed, which I laughingly agreed with.  I asked him how the political system worked in his country.  He told me about how there was a King with no voting and that when he died his brother or heir would succeed him. I asked if that bothered him at all.  He paused a minute before shaking his head to say no, it's the police you have to worry about he told me.

      After this we moved on to lighter topics.  We talked about multi-tasking and chess.  He explained to me some internet games he plays on how amazing the web is for connection people all over the world.  Last time we met, Bandar asked me to send him a link to my blog once I had explained the concept to him.  This week he mentioned it.  "It was good," he told me, "I liked it."  This made me happy since I had been a bit apprehensive at first about sending him the link.  These posts are about my learnings and my opinions on the experience and I did not know what he would think of my outside view. I asked what he had to do for our meetings.  He explained that the teacher had given them a sheet to talk about what we had discussed.  I asked him what he put down and he told me "everything."  This apparently did not go over well with his teacher, who insisted he specify what type of "everything" we talked about.  This made me laugh too because we often talk about so many vague and varying topics, that when I sit down to write my blog posts I often have a hard time remembering specific topics of discussion. We are hoping to meet again this Friday providing he doesn't get too sick again but it was good to catch up.