CP#2 - Tingwei

I met with my second conversation partner, Tingwei, at CIES. We walked around campus for a bit and ended up at the Oglesby Union since it was raining. Tingwei is from Taiwan and speaks both Chinese and Taiwanese. We mainly spoke about television and food. I brought up Leonardo DiCaprio and his role in Inception and the Great Gatsby (I had just seen Inception for the second time the night before). Then we spoke about the Great Gatsby and how it was a great book but not such a great movie (Tingwei had never heard of the book but did know of the movie). I told him some things about F. Scott Fitzgerald and why he had written The Great Gatsby, since it was both a very personal novel about Fitzgerald’s marriage, but also a critique on American consumerism. How enough is never enough. This led us to talking about Black Friday and how I don’t shop on that day because there are way too many aggressive shoppers and it overwhelms me. Not to mention the many Walmart greeters who have been trampled by overzealous shoppers. Then I made a short list of outrageously silly products that I had heard of that served no real purpose, like cat wine.

We also spoke plenty about food. Tingwei is a big fan of soups, and I asked him if he had ever tried gazpacho. He thought it sounded interesting when I explained the soup to him, though he did find it a bit odd since gazpacho is served cold. Tingwei also mentioned that he had once visited Miami, which naturally led to a discussion about Cuban food and how awesome plantains are. Personally, I think plantains are one of the greatest crops ever to exist, since they can be used at any stage of ripeness to make different dishes.