All conversations with Alex

I'm Jean-philippe, Alex's penfriend. In this post, I will describe and sum up what we talked about during our conversations.
First, I would like to say that Alex is a very cool guy and I enjoyed speaking with him. 

Alex is a second generation American : his mother has some english-irish-french-german origins, and his father has come to America from Iran when he was younger.  He has also three brothers.
Alex is studying Philosophy and Computer sciences in Irvine at the University of California, and he expects to do law studies next year.
Alex practises Jiu Jitsu, a martial art which is almost the same for me with Judo. He also enjoys playing other sports and watching it. Alex loves listening to music and he plays guitar.
We both like playing video games. 

We also compaired our campuses : American campuses are really huge and stretch on several kilometers, forming little towns, whereas French campus which are smaller and where buildings are more dispatched.
Otherwise, American and French student Lives are similar. 
We talked about our cursus which are very different, because mine is more scientific. In the US, the equivalent of "Licence" (3 years) is called a "Bachelor" (4 years). 
To finance his studies, he receives some stock exchange from the government. 

Concerning student jobs, Alex taught English, Informatics and Mathematics as a tutor, just like me last year, where I was a biochemics tutor. Besides, as for me, he likes repairing, caring about his car and fixing some stuff like that. 

Discussing about the series we used to watch, we compaired the different TV shows and channels, we agreed that there are too many boring shows such as reality TV shows in the both countries (much more in the US), but Alex is lucky to have the possibility to watch a large range of free sport channels, unlike here in France. 

We also talk about the current news, with the famous crime in Ferguson and more recently in NYC. 
We both don't understand why the American court is protecting the policemen and why they are not fairly judged. I made the connexion with a similar problem in France with some policemen where recently a young man died in a protest march because of a grenade sent by a policeman, even if it was not a problem of racism, the debate is currently very splited in France, where police's authority and bludering is putting back into question, just like in the US. 
We also agreed on the fact that the economic crisis is making more and more protest marches around the world. 

Alex is actually learning french because he would like to travel in Europe (also in Africa), and especially because he thinks that learning a language is good for a personal development, and I totally agreed with him. 
I think Alex is doing is best to learn french and I'm sure he will progress rapidly by the way. I know it's a very hard language to learn. 

We actually talked about a lot of other stuff that I don't remember now but we took our time to speak (our first conversation lasted more than one hour). 

I also asked him about what does it mean to be American for him, and he answered me that it is linked to the qualities about working in general. 

We both know that it is quite difficult to discuss with a penfriend who is in the other side of the planet because of the big time difference, but I told him if he would have some problem in french language learning, I would be pleased to give him a hand and help him.

See ya

Jean-philippe