My First and Second Day as an Intern

My First Impressions

On my first day, I noticed that the majority of senior participants have different nationalities which it made more interesting. As a student of language and culture, this is really good way to gain information and expose in different culture. Furthermore, the social club has different activities on each Wednesday of the week. This is what I love the most because we  have the chance to participate, and we also have the advantage to experience and learn from it.

Every Wednesday in the social club, they do yoga that takes at least an hour. In addition also, one of the activities that day was potluck so everyone brought their own food to share.  I and Arina met most of the seniors and other volunteers. We also had the opportunity to be a participant of the yoga activity. After the yoga, everyone had their lunch and conversation to each other. To be able to improve my English I sat down with a group and had a mini conversation with them. From this conversation I learned that most of them traveled from different countries.

           

Cultural Observation

It happened that I had a question to ask to my internship host and I addressed her Miss Sonia but then she told me not to call her miss, Sonia is perfect for her. The majority of French women wanted  to be call Madame; I guess as an English person, it doesn’t matter. Moreover, when we were heading to the social club, an ambulance passed by and our internship host touched the red bag that I was carrying that time. I didn’t know before that English people are also quite superstitious believer.

Language Lexicon

            Today at the social club we had the Laughter Workshop led by Ms. Helen, from this workshop I learned new words by mostly taking a risk to guess through her gestures. The first word that grabbed my attention was the word gibberish. At first, I didn’t understand what she meant when she used this word. Finally, she gave us clues by talking in random words. Then, I finally understood that gibberish is talking about nothing meaningful. Also to make sure if I was right after the workshop I went and asked her about it and she explained it and I was right.  Second, is the word devilish, she used this word to describe the Joker’s laugh. I was quite lost when she used it in a sentence even the joker word was in it. It just made sense to me when she laughed in a wicked way. 

  

Misunderstanding

I had a conversation with the other volunteer and she asked how old I am and I responded her:

Me: I’m thwensix years old.

Her: What you're 36?!

Me: No! No! I’m twenty six. 

After my internship, I asked myself why the other volunteer heard 36 instead of 26. Then, I repeated myself saying thwensix and I figured it out why she heard 36 because the way I pronounced the letter T with H and it doesn’t help also because of my accent.