Zachary Backes - CP 9

6/23/12

Ok, Milanos Pizzaria does not, I repeat, Does Not Exist! at least according to google maps. I had Invited Faisal out to get some Pizza and watch Ramin's band play tonight. Problem was, I couldn't find this freaking place! Faisal had come to pick me up so we were in his car which was equipped with not one, but two GPS systems. Apparently a GPS is a pretty common gift since his uncle and one of his brothers got him one when he came over seas.

I had gotten the address off their website and we had it plugged into both systems and my phone and neither of us could find it. About two days later I finally biked past it and I found out that since it is located in a larger parking lot for a shopping center the address doesn't really match up to its actual location. But neither of us knew that on this Saturday night. We spent about 30min wandering around Monroe street. Finally I figured it was time to alter the plans and make tonight a movie night to make up for the horrible one we had seen earlier that week.

But as Faisal likes to put it "first, there should be food" of which I adamantly agreed. Here we ran into another problem, it was almost 10:00pm and nothing we went to was open. I was determined not to resort to fast food again, but finding something decent at that hour is not easily done. We got turned away from three different spots and both of us were getting a little discouraged. We looped back around and decided to head into town on Monroe, as we did Faisal pointed to a restaurant and said "is this place good?" I followed his gaze to the local Hooters and about busted a gut laughing. It took a moment to compose myself and I had to explain what Hooters, both the term and the type of restaurant, was. That lead to a round of laughter on both parts.

It actually lead to a really awesome conversation on how women are treated between our two cultures. Faisal was talking about he really likes how women are treated as equals in most regards in our culture. Now for those of you who might have just balked at that last statement understand; Faisal comes form a country where women are not allowed to drive, adultery can be punishable by death (not legally but it happens culturally), and most women must cover their hair in order to not tempt men. I told him how western Media has a pretty big issue with the objectification of women and an overly sexual mentality. He seemed to understand but was still pretty adamant that it was better to be a women in America then anywhere else.

This conversation lasted all the way until we got to Decent Pizza, which thankfully was open. We continued to speak about the differences in perception about things like homosexuality, abortion, religious freedoms all through dinner. We got so wrapped up in the conversation that we never even went to a movie. The main thing that surprised me about the convo as a whole though, was how even though our cultures had such a wide gap between their viewpoints the gap between where me and Faisal stood on most of the issues was much smaller. of there were some points of contention, he really believes that homosexuality is an unhealthy act and leads to diseases, even though he holds no real malice towards them. but over all we were very similar in our thinking. It just goes to show that culture only has so much effect on ones agency, at the end of the day we are not solely our culture, we can have opinions that differ from the masses.