Greek Festival

Greek Festival

Social Event Reflection

30 August 2019, 7pm, Greek Orthodox Cathedral

This event was just a fun time where we were around parts of Greek culture. There was live music, dancing, traditional Greek foods, art, and more. This event showed me how fun Greek culture is, and that many Greek people just like to have fun with their families. I also tried many new foods there such as gyros, baklava, and feta. This just showed me some parts of Greek culture that I have never experienced in my life. This event releases to the topic of International Affairs because it is about the culture of a different group of people. This is something that we learned about recently in our International Affairs seminar. I basically just gained a new perspective of Greek culture because the only “experience” that I have had prior to this event was in movies. As mentioned before, we recently learned about culture in our IA seminar, so it really relates to that topic. After attending this event, I would have asked some of the people there about the origins of their culture. I would also ask if living in the United States impacts how they express themselves. Overall, this experience just gave me the opportunity to experience a little bit of Greek culture without going all the way to Greece. It also showed me that some day I would liked to go to Greece to have cultural experiences that cannot be expressed as well in the United States as they would be in Greece.

 

Global Engagement Movie Night Reflection

Global Engagement Night at Gateway Film Center (Honeyland)

Academic/ Social Event Reflection

28 August 2019, Gateway Film Center, 7-9pm

This documentary really opened up my eyes when it comes to knowing how other people live their lives. The people in this documentary struggled with issues that many people do not even realize that people live without. The main character and her mother lived in a very small house and did not have the luxuries that many of us have in the United States. Despite the struggles to meet basic needs, the main character was kind to everyone and worked hard as a beekeeper, selling her honey in small shops. She even treated the bees with kindness; when harvesting the honey, she was very gentle with them and always was sure to leave half of the honey for them and only take half for herself. She helped her neighbors start beekeeping so they could get extra money, and when they did not take her advice and ended up destroying all of her hard work, she continued working hard trying to get back to how she was before.

Watching this woman struggle to live at times yet still being compassionate changed my perspective on life. It showed me that kindness really is the best option when it comes to people and even bees. This also opened my mind up to how some Turkish people live since this was a real person’s life there. I had never really seen how Turkish people live, and although I know that this is just a few people’s lives, this showed some common struggles that they can have, especially unmarried Turkish women. This relates to international affairs because it showed how some international people struggle and how some people in Turkey live their lives daily. I have never learned about the Turkish people, so this was really my first experience with their culture. After attending this event, I started to wonder how the wealthy people in Turkey live. The movie showed some people who struggled with money, so it would be interesting to see the other end of the spectrum. I would probably ask the main character of this documentary about her life when she was younger, and I would also ask how she remained so optimistic when she went through awful times in life.