6th Meeting with Khalifa

On Wednesday, I met with Khalifa for the sixth time. The first thing we talked about was Black Friday. He went out with his friends and was shocked by how crazy everything was. He had never seen anything in America that was that chaotic. However, once he saw the prices of the items he said he completely understood. And then, he watched as his sister proceeded to buy tons of stuff. He enjoyed getting to experience the atmosphere but didn’t really need anything, so he bought a few shirts. He really enjoys getting to experience the eccentricities of American culture.

Next, we talked about his trip to Washington DC. He went alone because he had to get registered to move to California. While there, he saw and met so many Saudi Arabian students  that he concluded he could never learn English in DC because he would never have to practice the language. He told me some stories about DC, about how gorgeous it was, and about getting to see the White House. I have always wanted to visit DC but I have never had the chance so I was extremely jealous.

He also told me a story about his taxi getting into an accident. Khalifa and his taxi driver were driving by the White House and the driver was pointing things out and explaining certain aspects of the White House. While he was doing so, another taxi was trying to speed around them and ended up rear ending them. I imagined how annoyed and flustered the second taxi driver must have been and thought this story was rather hilarious. However, Khalifa was much more concerned about everyone’s safety and was just glad that nobody was injured. Throughout our meetings, Khalifa really hasn’t found any instances of physical humor funny. At one of our meetings, we watched somebody walk into a glass door. I was cracking up. He felt really bad for the person and wanted to make sure that they were ok. Clearly, there are vast cultural differences regarding our opinions of physical humor. America has embraced movies such as Jack Ass. But, based on my meetings with Khalifa, I doubt Saudi Arabia will ever embrace anything similar.

I also brought Tales of Juha to show Khalifa. I handed him the book and asked if he recognized it. At first, he didn’t seem to recognize it and I was beginning to feel extremely stupid. Then, a huge smile began to form and I could tell that it clicked. He didn’t recognize Juha at first because he had never seen the name written in English. He was so pleasantly surprised. Finally, we had an element of his culture that we could both talk about. He was absolutely shocked that Tales of Juha was a book that we were reading in class. Basically, he described Juha as a celebrity. He’s not as popular as he once was but if you walk up to anyone in Saudi Arabia and show them the book, they will immediately know who you are talking. I asked him about why there are so many stories about Juha involving his donkey. First, he made clear that donkeys are not as common in Saudi Arabia as Tales of Juha may make it seem. But, he told me that there are two versions of stories about Juha, stories with him and his donkey and stories with him and his family. Khalifa said that he thinks the stories with the donkey are much funnier. He also finds the wit and wisdom stories funnier than the ones where Juha is stupid. We spent the rest of our dinner talking about the book. I mentioned some of my favorite stories. Some of them he recognized and some of them he did not but it was nice to finally have a subject to talk about where he was the expert.