Pasta Hair

Yesterday (Wednesday), I had another first experience!! I had a separate break at work than Beth, so I had to go get dinner alone. I found the restaurant (without getting lost!!), and ordered my own food all by myself. Beth has been teaching me a little bit of Korean every day, so I've been picking it up pretty quickly. I rarely practice though, because we're almost always together, and she just orders for me :) I felt very successful though! The lady understood me perfectly, and I got what I ordered :)

Learning how to read Korean has been a fairly easy process. There are only a few symbols to learn that represent sounds. It's very interesting though: the words written in Korean most of the time translate to English, with a little bit of a Korean accent :) Sometimes, though, they will sound out like a Korean word instead, and then you have to know what that Korean word means. It may sound confusing, but it's really not.

For example: if I look at an instant coffee mix packet here and sound out the Korean on it, it says: "ca-fe-mix-uh" which means "coffee mix." It's pretty simple once you get the hang of it. I'm still practicing a lot, but I can't imagine it will be much longer before I can start reading signs.

Coffee shops are really easy to order in because everything "sounds out" into English. So, I can walk into a coffee shop and say, "car-a-mel ma-key-ah-to," and they'll make me a caramel macchiato. See?

Yesterday, the younger kids learned about different foods at the grocery store, how to figure out what you have already, and what you need to buy at the store. (By the way, Koreans HATE cheese, so you'll never find it here unless it's fake or really processed or something...) Anyway, we were going through a bunch of different foods, some that they eat and some that they don't. We finished up early, so I was asking the students what their favorite foods were. One of the girls said, "pasta! you hair! pasta! haha!" She was telling me that my curly hair looked like pasta...wonderful... :) One of the other kids said, "pizza!" So I decided to have them make a list of what you would need to make a pizza. They said, tomato sauce, (no cheese, of course), mushrooms, bread (dough), pepperoni, and then I thought someone said spinach. So, I wrote "spinach" down on the board. All the kids started laughing. Apparently, the student had said, "finished!" instead of spinach. I started laughing, too, and apologized, but told them that spinach was still really good on pizza. They thought that sounded so gross! It was just one of many confusing moments we've had at the school. The kids are very forgiving though, and realize that you're learning just like they are :)

Something interesting that I learned here is that the students get to choose their own American name that is used at the school. I had two kids in different classes, one named Circle and one named Dragon. It took me a second to realize they weren't kidding. I thought they were trying to trick "Jamie Teacher," but they were completely serious! :) Interesting name choices...