International Students + Ballroom Dancing

I signed up for OU Cousins, and while I did not end up getting matched, I did end up getting to know some international students. This past spring, my roommate Megan suggested that we take Ballroom Dancing as a class this fall, and little did I know how much I would enjoy it. We have learned classic North American dances such as the waltz, the two-step, the swing, the cha-cha, and line dances, as well as Latin American dances such as the tango and the merengue, but I was not expecting to meet so many international students.

In our class, we have students from Germany and South Korea as well as students from other parts of the world. Most of them are foreign exchange students who are here for a year, similar to how I was at the University of Glasgow for a semester. I remember at the beginning of the semester, when I would dance with someone knew, I would ask them what made them interested in taking this class. For the international students, their answer would typically be that they were interested in American culture; while many people our age do not know how to ballroom dance (at least the people that I know), it was still cool to see that while they were here, they wanted to learn more about our history and our dances. Not to mention Scotland in each of my posts, but I feel like it’s similar to how I wanted to take bagpipes while I was abroad: it isn’t necessarily something that all of the citizens of that country can do, but it’s still a part of their culture that you were learning about.

I have become fast friends with some of the international students in my class. One of them is dancing with me in our final next week as part of a competition, and I love that we are both aiming to win it. I’ve gotten to hear about their Thanksgiving experiences, in which a few of them got to travel home with American friends and experience a classic American Thanksgiving meal. I’ve heard perspectives on air conditioning, which is not in common in Europe (“I don’t like the constant changing of temperatures from inside to outside!”), as well as just remember what I felt like as a foreigner living in another country and all that that entails.

While this is not an exact international club, I feel like I got to experience others’ thoughts on American culture through ballroom dancing, which is not something that you get to do everyday, and I am so grateful for this experience.