Cross Cultural Experience

Student: Walid ABRAZ
Date: 08/15/2011

IEP Weekly Paragraph
Write a paragraph about a specific topic, using your own ideas or taking a title from the back of this page. Below, write the new language you will practice. These new words, phrases, and grammar points can come from class or your own reading. Please feel free to type this up instead of writing on this sheet. New vocabulary words I will use * To depict * Blubbering * To forge * Come out, get out (phrasal verbs) * Foregoing * To be thrilled * Compatriots * Henceforth * Multidisciplinary | New grammar points I will use 1. Counterfactual: If I had more free time, I would travel to Nigeria to see her again… 2. Speculation: The Liquefied Natural Gas industry must undoubtedly be the most significant cross-cultural experience I’ve been faced with… 3. Transition words: Moreover, Furthermore, In other context, Despite, Unfortunately, Henceforth, In retrospect… 4. Adverb clause: As long as, by the time… 5. Idioms: Damn |

My memorable Cross-Cultural Experiences
I have always valued the learning of other languages and peoples’ cultures. As a Communications Executive who was working for an Oil & Gas company, I have always been in permanent contact with clients and partners. Also, all the events I attended, and business trips I made, allowed me to expand my international experience professionally and personally.
Regarding my professional position and my field of activity, I had the chance to live strong and several intercultural experiences. Indeed, international fairs and exhibitions are in my opinion an excellent means of intercultural communication with players of varied backgrounds and different cultures. Among these prestigious events, the International Oil Exhibition I attended in November 2007 in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) was a great opportunity to exercise my skills of marketer. During this event, many were my cross-cultural experiences, not only because of my constant contact with attendants coming from 13 countries, but were also due to the different friendships I’ve built and memories I kept, such as the strong friendship forged with Mrs. Philo Ikoko, representative of a Nigerian company. With this friendly 50 years old woman coming from another country, the contact was very easy. Together we experienced lot of things, learned from each other and shared our ideas... Meeting this amazing woman marked me a lot. Besides, I always have tears coming out every time I see the pictures taken with her, or when I think about the last day of the exhibition when she came to say goodbye, offering me African statutes. I’m sure if I had more free time, I would certainly travel to Nigeria to see her again.
Moreover, during my stay in Riyadh, the funniest anecdote that I can think of, is when I, with three of my colleagues, took a taxi at 11:30pm wanting to get to the mall before its scheduled closing at 12:00pm. When we were in the taxi, the driver who was Yemeni didn’t stop laughing at us watching us screaming, blubbering with each other and laughing while asking him to drive quickly. When asked he told us he had never met such a funny people. In retrospect, I consider this funny experience as cross-cultural, because as Algerians we inherit the temperate character of Mediterranean people using hand signs and gestures when speaking. In fact, this experience with the Yemeni taxi driver has left me a big impression and allowed me to learn how to behave in the future.
Furthermore, LNG 16 the largest congress in the world dedicated to the Liquefied Natural Gas industry must undoubtedly be the most significant cross-cultural experience I’ve been faced with, where my professional skills as well as my personal qualities were performed on a large scale. I’ve been lucky to co-organize this prestigious event, dealing easily during several months with highly skilled Australian and British professionals. This event was a real occasion where my cross-cultural experience had covered the "exceptional" character of a multidisciplinary meeting in business.
Fairs and exhibitions strongly contribute in intercultural communication and cross-cultural experiences. Confirming in fact the famous idea of the "global village" of Marshall McLuhan, where boundaries become permeable and depict people of different cultural identities.
In other context, as a Communications responsible, all advertisements’ offers used to land in my office. I remember one day I received an advertising offer from an Algerian Communication Agency. The offer was sent through a postman who was wearing a sun glasses when entering my office; I'd respectfully and kindly requested him to remove his glasses. The postman was very angry and got out of my office very quickly, I immediately called his manager who explained me that this gentleman was from a central region of the country where the men do not accept remarks made to them by younger people. This “bad experience” confirmed that even among compatriots; there are cultural differences due to educational and social environments and led me to admit that cross-cultural experiences are also a kind of learning how to accept the improbable and the unexpected.
Often people think cultural understanding only means that one is aware of the fascinating religions, charming holidays and regional traditions of the different people all over the world. Unfortunately, cultural understanding also means learning why people segregate others and hate people different from themselves. Real understanding of another culture, my own included, means recognizing the negative aspects of it and trying to coexist with them.
By the time I was thinking on how to conclude on this essay, I wanted to talk about the most joyful and exciting cross-cultural experience I am presently living here in Northampton at ILI. It is definitely the place where I really had the time to know and learn about cultural differences, ways of thinking and personalities form all over the world, starting by the most friendly, cheerful, and helpful people I’ve ever met in my whole life, namely the Americans and native U.S citizens who work for ILI; to end by evoking the funny Indonesian girl Dwi ; Indianara the friendly, caring, and considerate Brazilian physicist ; the peaceful Japanese Azako, the lovely Salvadorian Claudia who used to ask me : “What are you trying to say?” when she couldn’t understand my jokes, damn!, she was so funny. And finally those other Asian ILI students who love to constantly take pictures such as the Japanese Dice-K with his difficulties of pronouncing the expression “…on and on!”, and the friendly funny Hiro. All those henceforth friends of mine have fed the right side of my brain with the cross-cultural and differences’ understandings.
Finally, and despite the foregoing, I want to say that as long as I am young and ambitious, I’ll certainly remain enthusiastic and thrilled by the opportunity to continue learning more about other cultures, and looking forward to interacting with the varied cultures represented by people worldwide. I know that I will appreciate their points of view and value their understandings; I have already learned to respect and accept the diversity and differences in culture of the Nigerian woman, the Yemeni taxi driver, the Algerian postman, and the ILI American teachers and foreign students.