Katherine-CP#2

I had been looking forward to this next cultural workshop after the first one. We were put into the same groups again and given a worksheet that asked us to take a hard, careful look at our cultures and decide from a word/term bank what was culturally visible and what lurked beneath the day-to-day surface. The worksheet used the picture of an iceberg to illustrate this point. My group, similar to the last time, got very swept up in conversation with one topic leading to the next. Sarah, the shyest and most soft-spoken one of our group wound up being this session's center of attention. She is from the Middle East and considers herself very traditional. She talked at great length about modesty in her culture which lead to so many interesting discoveries like beach culture (there aren't really public beaches; only the rich rent out private beaches and women can go uncovered there) and wedding traditions (only the father-in-law can see the bride's face). I did not realize that divorce is actually allowable under any conditions and a little about the process a wife can undergo to divorce her husband. She also talked a bit about arranged marriage and what she thinks of it. Much of what she said was new information to all of us and we were naturally quite curious. We also talked a bit about our cultural attitudes and how they affect promptness and the population's general conception of time. I learned so much this lesson about things I would have never even thought about.