I have had to do that often in my travels, but not with Jasmine...as much. We still do it sometimes and also look up words thanks to our smartphones & Google Translate. Arabic is not a language that I speak, and I sometimes ask her how to say some words in Arabic too. We often laugh at one another's pronunciations and have fun with it.
Having fun seems to be a universal need. For instance, Jasmine and I both enjoy laughing with friends, watching movies and eating delicious food! We shared photos of the kinds of things our families make. We learned that when it comes to salads, we prefer vinaigrettes over thick dressings like Ranch or Thousand Island. (Getting to the point of being able to explain vinaigrette versus a thick dressing was one of our more challenging discussions! In this case descriptions and sound effects worked - a thick "plop" more like mayo as opposed to a "trickling" stream more like olive oil.) On the other hand, Jasmine prefers sweet and I prefer salty. Can you tell we like talking about food?
One of our other prescribed talking points brought us back to food. We were asked to discuss hospitality and to bring in a photo depicting hospitality. Jasmine had a photo of her family's dining room table filled with food she and her mother had made for some visitors. It all looked so yummy! My photo was of a daisy on a nightstand that a host placed in their guestroom for me. There's a long story behind it, but that would take up another entire journal entry, so suffice it to say the photo represents hospitality to me. One really cool thing about this activity is that we each write about one another's photo, and later, both the photo and the story about it will be displayed in an exhibit at the Irish Museum of Modern Art!
