22 Mar 2015
I completed a TalkAbroad assignment for my Spanish 201 class at Clemson University. My partner and I talked to Cristina Chaves Zambrano from Costa Rica. In my opinion, I thought it went pretty well-but it could have gone better. Grace and I came prepared with many questions, but we soon found out that we didn’t have enough, and we had to make up our own questions on the fly. Cristina was very nice and was very understanding about our situation, and even asked us some questions of her very own. I liked how we got to talk to someone our own age. It was quite the change from speaking to our professor and him critiquing everything that we say. I liked that we got to learn about her culture and she got to learn about ours. What surprised me about this experience was that there are so many interesting things to do in Costa Rica concerning nature and art that I hadn’t thought of before, and I was also surprised that she didn’t know that much about American culture. A fun part of our conversation was when we asked Cristina about her daily eating habits. While she was telling us about what she ate for breakfast, there was one word that we didn’t know and that she couldn’t describe. We kept on wondering what it was, and it turns out she was talking about pudding! That was one of the highlights of our conversation. Overall, I thought that we had a good experience with TalkAbroad and Cristina, and I can’t wait to do it again (our professor requires us to do two of these conversations).