Fifth Meeting with Zooz

As nice and as friendly Zooz is, today’s meeting was a bit awkward. We’ve been meeting so often recently we’ve begun to run out of new subjects to talk about. I’m pretty sure he asked “How are you?” like four times. We have a few things in common, but we can only talk about our mutual hatred of the cold so many times. I’m hoping with the extra time on our hands from the break we’ll have some new adventures to discuss next week.

Since it’s near the end of the semester and Zooz gets to go home soon, I asked him what he’s most looking forward to seeing again or what he misses the most. He said he misses his family, especially his parents and one of his nephews. His nephew is adorable, he is probably between seven and ten. He has long hair and Zooz always makes sure I know he is a boy and not a girl. Along with family, Zooz also misses his job and is excited to escape the cold weather.

I asked him if many people in Saudi Arabia know English, and he told me not really. He has two or three family members that do, but he has more than twenty siblings so that doesn’t make up much of his family at all. I thought it was really cool that he’d be one of the only people in his family to speak English. Learning a new language is difficult, and he doesn’t have much family here. It’s incredibly impressive, especially with how clearly he already speaks.

Finally, since it’s one of our favorite topics, we talked about soccer again. My team lost my intramural game so I’m done playing, but he has one more game next week. We also talked about his favorite professional team, who unfortunately lost last time they played. It was a close game, and he showed me the videos of all the goals. It was tied 1-1 with minutes left in the game, when the other team got a penalty shot and scored. Zooz was watching it on his iPad and said he was so upset that he threw it after the last goal. His friends have been teasing him about his team losing, and he showed me how they were even still texting him during our meeting. Don’t worry, he was smiling and taking it well. After that I had to go to class; even though the meeting started out a little slow, it picked up and went well. I’m excited to meet with him one last time after break.