In my Talk Abroad I spoke with a guy from Morocco named Salah. Salah is a Ph.D. student studying physics. We had a really good conversation. He was very friendly and very helpful. We were able to laugh several times during our conversation and in some cases talked about things that I did not prepare for, but I was still able to talk about. He had me ask him questions rather than the other way around, which was at first hard, but I did like how the conversation worked because of this. I was forced to formulate questions and then rather than relying on the answers I had studied before, I had to interact with Salah’s answer to my question. In our conversation we talked about our families, our schooling, futures, food, music, interests, and even a little bit about the differences between our countries. 

A couple of cultural notes that I thought were interesting were his musical interests as well as the use of the metric system. I was excited to hear that we had a similar taste in music and he even wrote down some of the artists whom I had mentioned so that he could look them up later. I did notice that his musical interests tended towards older music from the America. As for the metric system, I during the conversation we were talking about exercising and he asked me how many kilos I could lift. As I did not know the metric system I had to look up the conversion so we could be on the same page. 

Overall I enjoyed the conversation and I felt like I learned from talking with Salah. I especially was able to recognize my weak points. I had several points in the conversation where I took some long pauses, I had to ask him to repeat himself several times, and there were times that I simply blanked and forgot the words I wanted to say. I think I could do better with this by using a more wholistic approach to my preparation for Talk Abroads and also trying to stay calmer during the conversation so that I do not become so flustered that I forget things that I learned in French 101.