Our Skype session with Steve Sherman and Sebastian Panakal about Black Friday and other interesting topics.

(unfortunatelly no pictures, sorry about that!)
December 3rd, 2013
This morning we started the conversation class as usual talking about what happened in the city or in our lives during the weekend and somehow the conversation boiled down to Black Friday and other imported practices and traditions that we manage to import from abroad and pop up in Santa Fe, Argentina without anyone actually knowing the origin or reason for it.  I asked my student what her background knowledge was about this, and she informed me that she had received an email invitation from the local huge supermarket branch to pay a visit and take advantage of the convenient offers due for last Friday.  She did not go, but added that later on some of her clients commented that lots of people gathered at the shop to buy.  To shed some light on the subject I decided to invite my friends from Hello Little World and received some written feedback such as this:
Black Friday = big sales.  Enough of them so that the businesses, which much of the year supposedly run negative profit balances (or are 'in the red') begin their biggest month of profit so that now they are in positive balance (or 'in the black'). Hence the name: Black Friday!, by Janet Barnstable;
and this by Joe Mc Nulty:
Black Friday is always the Friday after Thanksgiving in the US.
Did you know President Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving in the 1930's to increase retail sales?  http://www.businessinsider.com/facts-about-black-friday-2011-11 during the great depression?
 We got a request to join in the discussion from our friend Sebastian Panakal, from Cochin, Kerala, India, who also wanted to learn about the subject and we were joined in the discussion by our friend Steve Sherman from Cape Town in South Africa.
Steve told us that crowds also gather in huge stores to take advantage of the sales in his country, he later commented that he does most of his purchases online and he introduced us to the term Cyber Monday which was coined by online stores to take advantage of this sales craze thing, so Cyber Monday would be the online version of Black Friday.  An amazing coincidence because my student is also into online shopping, which she uses  to find and purchase her antique tiles, a hobby she has pursued for a long time.  Steve then went on to recommend a site where my student will surely find bargains and the best thing is that that will be in English, so she will practice it without really noticing it!
We went on to talk about holidays and we learned that in South Africa the Summer holiday is shorter than in Argentina but they get several longish breaks during the year.  My student left the classroom happy to have met my friends Steve and Sebastian both of them friendly and ready to help.  Thank you for helping me bring the world into the classroom!  After the session we used Google Earth to visit both towns virtually by seeing some wonderful pictures of your cities.