Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Culture Night

Last Friday was the first culture night for our ISU Summer Program. There was Austria, Turkey, Ireland, and then the United States. There were 16 of us from the U.S., and we decided to make our presentation more fun and silly than serious. Since the event is scheduled late evening, serving alcohol as part of your presentation is encouraged, and its meant to be a social event, so it went over well.

We organized our presentation as 15 one-minute segments on U.S. culture, which included: Multicultural backgrounds, baseball, football, celebrity gossip, line dancing, the hokey pokey, Michael Jackson, and lots more.

Stephanie and I did a section on lessons you can learn from American Movies. For example, we said that from Harry Potter, you could learn that British people were magic. Based on Superman, Batman, and Spiderman, we concluded that if you see an American wearing glasses, they are probably a superhero. Overall our presenation was very well received, and we had a lot of fun performing it. I'm really looking forward to future presenations.
We concluded culture night with some fireworks (which we had meant for fourth of July, but had to be postponed), which Damaris had acquired from a Spanish guy in our program. They were pretty awesome - I never reallized you could just buy fireworks this big!

After culture night was over, we headed to the Marina stop on the metro to a club called Merlin. (This seemingly simple endeavor actually took over 2.5 hours of transit time due to slow night buses and metro stops under construction... but we made it!)

No comments: