Blog #1: Social

Learning of another’s cultures’ intriguing foods, traditions, and the reasons for them etc. is always unfailingly fascinating and valuable. This fact led me on an expedition with my friend/classmate Natari, a fellow freshman at Baruch, to the floor 11 room 130 inside the Vertical building on Lexington Ave. During the initial 10 seconds of entering the room, we appeared to be incognito to the rest of the gathering who were caught up with talking to no end and eating up some fresh cooking. Not long after we were confronted by an oriental person who could clearly perceive our newness to the group, “welcome to the Hong Kong club, venture in, get some food, we don’t bite” he said. The room was majority female, yet it was still loaded with the Asians except for Natari and I. When we conversed with a couple of them to ask them a few questions, we acquired a multitude of stats. An intriguingly ironic one being that almost everybody in the Hong Kong club wasn’t actually from Hong Kong. For some, the path that led them there was unknown, but for others, it could have been that they were simply grasping their ethnic foundation, following after a companion and/or to my perception hunger was a big motive. Finally, I met up with the President and Vice President of the organization, Rebecca and Derek. We spoke about what type of club it was, its events, its members, “we are for the most part a social club,” Rebecca stated, “although we have some consistent individuals week after week, nevertheless, we don’t stop seeing new faces at every gathering. Derek, VP, told us the basic schedule for the social club which consisted of General Interest Meetings, movie nights, and every so often Cantonese class. Overall it ended up being a cool environment, quite homelike despite the cultural dissimilarities.