Angélique Kidjo +++ UNICEF +++ Covid19 +++ Le Province +++ wedding rituals +++ Absolutely Intercultural 250

Do not hug

This show is coming to you from a partially locked down Denmark. Yes, this show is coming to you right in the middle of the COVID 19 pandemic with schools and businesses shut down and people advised to keep a good distance from each other. Fortunately, all the contributors to the show could be reached digitally. I talked to Elizabeth Anne, a former teacher based in the south of France who told me how the country is divided.

Then, I talked to Luis from Colombia, who recently moved to Denmark. In Colombia Luis was a wedding photographer but in Denmark, he discovered that wedding ceremonies were not so predictable.

Now, do you want to dance? Angelique Kidjo has recorded a special version of a song that was popular during the apartheid years in South Africa in the 1950s. The song Pata Pata means lightly touch but in these Covid 19 times the advice is no touching! So UNICEF, in collaboration with one of their goodwill ambassadors, Angelique Kidjo, has slightly changed the song so that it is about NOT touching and you can be in the video which comes out later this month if you film yourself dancing to it!

Continue reading “Angélique Kidjo +++ UNICEF +++ Covid19 +++ Le Province +++ wedding rituals +++ Absolutely Intercultural 250”

absolutely intercultural 41 +++ intercultural weddings +++ conventions for accepting food +++ my big fat Lebanese wedding +++

In this show we are going to look into which parts of our culture we have to re-think or even leave behind when we get married. We have entertaining stories from Lebanon, the United States, Hungary, and Spain and even from our own lives.

absolutely Swiss-French-Lebanese
Our first guest is Stéphane Bazan, lecturer at the Université St. Joseph, who is French and got married to his Lebanese bride in Biblos near Beirut. He tells us about the cultural conventions preceding his wedding which turned into a happy cultural mix for him and his French and Swiss family but also for his new Lebanese in-laws.

absolutely prepared
Jennifer is an American university lecturer who got married to her Lebanese husband in the United States. She remembers thinking about what cultural clashes could arise from the different customs and attitudes of her Lebanese and American families. She even went as far as giving some private intercultural lessons to prepare her family and her Lebanese in-laws for the happy day.

absolutely Mars vs. absolutely Venus
Agnes Dús, Laurent Borgmann, and Mathias Knops had a round table discussion about “leaving one’s own culture behind” where they tell their own stories about how difficult it can get when two persons from different cultures decide to stay together for life. Finally they had to admit that sometimes it is not the national culture which creates problems, simply the fact that men and women come from different planets: men are from Mars and women from Venus.

absolutely Big Fat Wedding
In the last part of our show we will get back to Stéphane, who tells us what cultural challenges he had to face before his “Big Fat Lebanese Wedding” with 800 guests! During the process he sometimes felt a considerable cultural gap between his families, as if he was not from France but from the other side of the world.

Our co-host today is Agnes Dús from Budapest in Hungary, student of the Corvinus University of Budapest. You may remember her from the interviews she made in Ireland for show number 25. She will co-host the shows from Remagen until Christmas.

The next show will be coming to you on the 19 October from Anne Fox in Denmark.

So long…stay tuned!

Host of this show: Dr. Laurent Borgmann
Co-host: Agnes Dús
Editor: Mathias Knops

Download
Podcast-Feed
iTunes-Abo