SPAN 106 cultural activity

Joy Prior
SPAN 106
Extra Credit Cultural Activity
I went to a Family Home Evening pot luck dinner with the multicultural community. It was really fun because everyone brought a homemade native food.
Some of the food that was there included… I don’t know the names, but I will describe the food.
One of my favorite things was almost like a flat churro. It was a very thin piece of sweet bread covered in cinnamon and sugar. The treat was about the size of a saucer plat, and so I could not finish it all. It was really sweet and good though. I liked it a little bit more than a churro, because it was crunchy. The crunch gave it a great flavor, and unlike a churro which is sometimes doughy in the middle the flat sugar and cinnamon bread was crispy and full of flavor.
Another thing that I tried was a taco with mash potatoes in it instead of meat. My friend L helped me to layer the taco with a white Mexican sour cream like sauce and then green hot sauce. I now that she only put a little of the green sauce on for me, but it was still really hot. The potatoes really helped to balance out the hot and spicy though, and I thought that was really rich and flavorful. I liked the green sauce, but only a little at a time. The taco was really good because it was completely homemade, and really who does not like tacos.
There were two major cultural differences that I noticed. They relate to how people come and go from a party. It is not only important to come to the party and just enter, but you have to go around and say hi to everyone, the people sitting down, the people standing, the people you know well, the people you don’t know at all. It seems that whenever someone entered the room they first dropped off their cultural dish and then walked around and kissed everyone on the check. Then they could go back and enjoy the party. It was something that was new to me, because when I enter a party I might say hi to the host but that is it.
The other thing that I observed was that before anyone left the party they made the same rounds. While they were saying good bye instead of just waving bye and leaving with their carpool they stopped to say good bye to not only the host, but to all of their friends there. I am used to parties were you try to “sneak” out before anyone can stop you and talk, but while I was there I learned that in most Hispanic cultures or at least at the party that I was at that night before everyone left the house they said good bye to their friends and made sure to talk for a few minutes. The entire process for one person to leave took at least ten minutes, for some of the people they were leaving the party for almost a half an hour.