by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
High school and UNM students toured the world Saturday.
The UNM World Language Expo in Ortega Hall provided a packed morning schedule with classes such as Japanese Origami, Intro to Arabic, Crepe Making, Chinese Calligraphy and German Stereotypes.
Dana Reinhardt, a German language teaching assistant, led the half-hour class on stereotypes. She divided more than 40 people into four groups and gave each group German, American, Chinese and French paper flags. Then she handed out strips of paper with stereotypes relating to each country.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
"Stereotypes are all around us, and they're important to discuss," Reinhardt said. "I thought it would be nice to have students think about why they think certain things of other countries."
Groups paired stereotypes like "They are uncultured," "They are very romantic," "They smile a lot," "They drink a lot of beer," and "They are hard workers" with each country's flag.
Afterward, Reinhardt and students discussed the results.
"Everybody had stereotypes, and they were willing to share them in class," Reinhardt said.
French professor Pamela Cheek organized a poetry session inspired by magnetic poetry and surrealist games.
Students got a three-page list of words - they could choose from Spanish, French or English - and from those words each composed a poem. The two best works were given prizes at the end of the expo.
"We talked a little about how surrealist poets make their poetry," Cheek said. "We used a famous poem that goes like this: 'The world is blue like an orange.' We talked about what shifting around the words does to make that poem."
Meanwhile, one room upstairs was dedicated to cuisine from different cultures.
Renee Johnson, vice president of the Japanese Club, stacked bits of sweet rolled omelet, called datemaki, over sushi. She said generally the Japanese eat the datemaki first because the taste is so light they can then distinguish the quality of rice in the sushi.
At the end of the day there was a capoeira demonstration by brothers Sebastian and Alejandro Pais Iriart while Portuguese language teaching assistant Narlan Teixeira kept the beat and sang.
Teixeira explained that capoeira is a mixture of martial arts and dancing that Brazilian slaves started as a way to train for escape.
"They decided it was a dance pretty much to keep the authorities unaware, so they could say 'Oh, we're just dancing' and at the same time they were practicing a martial art," Teixeira said.
Student Rowan Derrick said she liked the capoeira.
"It's really fun to watch," she said. "I wasn't here that long. I went to the Kimono workshop. It was a lot of cultural sort of lecturing. I think there were more people than they were expecting so it was less organized than it could have been."
Student Hawke Morgan said everything at the expo was interesting, and he wished he could have seen the entire presentation on Welch language.
"I only got to see the second half," he said. "It might have been better to have it go on for a longer period of time where there's less stuff overlapping."
He said he couldn't attend all the activities he would have liked to because of scheduling.
"There were like five or six things going on at once," Morgan said.
As the expo ended, the capoeira demonstration continued on the grass by the Duck Pond.
