مساء الخير

Good evening! On Friday eveing, my roommate from Minnesota and I went over to the apartment of two men from Iraq who are also studying here on the Goethe Institut. Both men are named Mohammad, and one of them is in our class. They invited us over for supper and wanted to share their traditional food with us.

We had accepted their invitation, but were not sure how comfortable the meal would be, especially because the one in our class had been somewhat hostile towards us as "Americans" in class. It actually turned out to be wonderful. We spent five hours preparing the delicious food, eating and talking. It meant a lot to both of them, but especially to Mohammad from our class, that we actually came to his home. He was really friendly and even said that we should have done that before, but he didn't think that Americans would ever accept an invitation from and Iraqi. We all had a lot of fun spending much of the evening laughing and joking around. I'm really glad that we had the opportunity to get to know each other better and eliminate the tension caused by political conflict between our homelands.