First Class of Korean Language :/

Today was the first day of class. It was hard but I felt like I learned so much. We basically went over the alphabet which is totally different. Each symbol makes a sound so sounds together makes up words but the symbols look like lines and boxes to me. I think I’ll get the hang of it eventually. Two of the vowels sound exactly the same to me and the teacher kept saying them and I was hearing one sound so she tried to help me but gave up after awhile. I still don’t understand it. J I know a few words now and we will learn more words and introduction phrases tomorrow I think. Once I get the alphabet down and can read, it will be a lot easier. They only have 24 letters but some letters combine to make other letters so it’s not as easy as I thought it would be. My mistake.

They told us we were having bread and milk for lunch, and I got worried for a little while. They were pastries and hotdogs (prepackaged) and were pretty decent. I ate a lot of them.

Then we went on an hour long bus ride to go make pottery. The ride was actually fun because I got to see the countryside, which is all mountains and SuJin and I played dots, hangman, Bingo, and other games we can play in the car. I made a plate of clay and wrote my name and Korea in Korean (with the help of SuJin) and drew a picture of the Korean flag. We’ll get them before we leave.

Then we went upstairs of the place and had tea and rice cakes. These rice cakes were a little different than the ones we had in Incheon. They were more like unsweet marshmallows and had red bean paste in them. The paste was actually pretty good.

We came back and immediately ate supper. It was some kind of meat in a spicy sauce and it was delicious, probably the best meal I’ve had or will have in the cafeteria. And we had more lemonade so I was quite happy.

We then met up with our groups that we are in for the kindergarten day. Our group just had to fine-tune what we talked about yesterday, but the other groups were just starting to get some good ideas. We are going to be doing an animal theme. Each foreigner and their buddy is going to have a few kids and tell them a story with an animal in it (Mine is little Red Riding Hood) and then we are making animal masks from paper plates and tambourines from paper plates. We are playing Simon says with an animal theme (Simon says jump like a frog, etc.) then singing “Old McDonald.” I hope it will be a blast and the kids like it. We then ate pizza for a snack. My table’s pizza had ham, sausage, pineapple and corn. Apparently corn is very popular on pizza here. Who would’ve thought? And Allie and I joked with the 3 English guys that are in our group. It was a fun night and day.