My second meeting with Alya was
the Thursday after our initial encounter. We decided to meet in the same place
but a little later in the day, to make sure our meeting did not conflict with
either of our schedules. Towards the end of our first meeting, Alya asked why I
was required to meet with an English Second Language, ESL, student, such as
herself. I responded that I wasn’t too sure honestly, except that eventually I
was going to ask her about Saudi Arabian humor. Besides that aspect, our
meetings were mostly a chance for me to help her with her English and to grow
as an individual. I told her she didn’t need to worry about preparing anything
about her country’s humor; we could talk about it further down the road. However,
my words fell on deaf ears. For our second rendezvous, Alya brought her iPad,
and we spent the next twenty to thirty minutes laughing and talking about the
videos, which she believed represented parts of Saudi Arabian culture and humor
well,
One of the videos she showed me was
a YouTube video titled Saudis in Audis. Apparently, the comedian who produced
the video makes many videos that are popular with people from the Middle
East. Here’s the clip:
At
first, I laughed or chuckled only to make sure the situation wasn’t awkward. I
saw the video was almost three minutes long, and I was not about to sit there
quietly for that long as the video played. However, as the video progressed,
Alya began to laugh quietly to herself. You know what they say… laughter is contagious.
I found myself cracking up multiple times. After the video ended, Alya told me that the video perfectly represented a lot of
rich Saudi Arabians. They are cocky, wealthy, have mustaches and are
obsessed with their cars, which actually happens to be an Audi a lot of the time
she said. Alya laughed pretty much continually from 1:24 until
the end. She laughed at the “longer than it takes me to do the whites” joke especially. I
laughed at this as well because her laughing made me think my stereotype of
them always wearing white robes was correct; interestingly, she said it was. She also laughed
hard when they said “Spahrite!” (Sprite hahaha) and were dancing. I have an
interesting picture of this demographic of people in my head now since she told
me the video was so accurate.
Unfortunately, I had another
engagement and had to leave before I wanted to, but we agreed to meet in two
days, on Thursday, and pick up where we left off. This meeting was still a
little bit awkward, but I’ve felt myself relax a little bit around Alya. I
think she has let her guard down a little bit more around me as well. We still
have a lot of meetings to have though, so hopefully we get better associated with one another each time.
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