Spanish Cultural Activity: Dinner visit

Joy Prior
Spanish 106
Section
Spanish For Me
1. Attend a cultural event in Spanish sponsored by the local Hispanic community or by BYU, such as a fair, festival, or fireside. In your 1 page written summary in Spanish or English, discuss what you understood and learned about the culture.

For my cultural event in Spanish I went to the Foreign Student Language Housing and visited the Spanish apartment for dinner. It is Brigham Young University on campus housing. In these apartments there are separate houses; in each of the houses the student promise to only speak the language that they are learning in their apartment, and that they will have dinner together five times a week. All of the students speak their language during the hour long dinner for practice. Each student is responsible for submitting two recipes for the semester and for cooking dinner with a team once a week.
The food that we ate came from Peru. My roommate Elizabeth cooked it, or I guess I should say that she submitted the recipe. Elizabeth is from Peru. The dish that the group of student chiefs cooked for us was one of Elizabeth’s favorite meals from her family. I cannot remember what she called it, but it was french-fries (those wide stake French-fries) covered in shredded meat and vegetables with lots of cheese on top. I think that it tasted good; the French-fries were really greasy. Some of the students put ketchup on the plate, but I didn’t. There was also a fruit salad for desert. I really loved the fruit salad because it was full of oranges, bananas, and grapes. I know that these fruits are not really Peruvian, but they were really good.
There were about 30 people at the dinner, and everyone sat down talked while they ate. Most of the conversation was about the same that you would expect during a church dinner social. Everyone asked each other how their day went, and what classes they had to go to that day. The conversation was simple and light. Although I could not follow everything that was being said (especially when people started to talk about why they chose their major, or when they retold specific stories about their day) I did understand enough to feel a part of the conversation.
It was the first time in my life when I could really hear a difference in people’s accents. One of the boys sitting at my table was from Spain. I am pretty sure that we were not speaking the same language. Up until then I have never heard someone speak in Spanish who is a native to Spain, and it was really unique to me. I think that the people who learned Columbian Spanish were also really hard to understand because they spoke so quickly. The accent that was the easiest for me to understand was native Mexican speakers. There speech was slower, and while comparing the different accents I noticed that Mexican Spanish even has some of the same sounds as English.
What really surprised me was Spanglish exressions. It was not just the people who were learning Spanish (I kind-a expected a lot of people learning Spanish to speak Spanglish) but a lot of the native speakers used expressions that I thought were purlly English; some people used: Wow, No way, and Freak. All of the words used had a very rich Spanish sound to them, but I guess they really stuck out to me because I was not expecting to hear such phrases in a Spanish sentence. I had no idea that so native Spanish speakers spoke fluent Spanglish.