While my meeting with my conversation partner today was completely impromptu, I believe it would count as a Conversation Partner meeting for the purposes of this blog and for the purposes of the conversation partner program in general. I ran into Abdulmohsen in the CIES lounge today and we decided to sit and talk. He was just getting out of his class with his friend while I was waiting for the TEFL class in the CIES lounge (we both ran into Ms. Kim later on, as she stopped by the lounge a few minutes later). I ended up asking Abdulmohsen about Riyadh and about what sites there were to visit in Riyadh if a person ever wanted to go there. He said that Riyadh has excellent museums, especially history museums. We ended up talking about the other large cities in Saudi Arabia. Abdulmohsen went into another room to produce a globe of the world to show me in which he pointed to his original hometown before he moved to Riyadh. He said he had been to a number of other Arab speaking countries besides Saudi Arabia and (as he had mentioned earlier) the United Arab Emirates. He had also spent some time in Kuwait, Yemen, and Oman, among others. He claimed he had visited just about every Arab-speaking country on the globe. Since he held a graduate degree, I asked him whether he had taken the GRE, to which he said no, since his graduate program did not require it. He said he had held a Teaching Assistant position in the past and wanted to become a full professor. He also gave me advice on possible topics I could pick for my culture presentation. He said that I could consider teaching jobs in Saudi Arabia, although he claimed most TEFL instructors in Saudi Arabia were British rather than American.
In general, we had an interesting conversation and it was nice to meet with him again.
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