For our fifth meeting, we met up at my apartment and decided to make homemade pizza and chocolate cream cake. Both of those foods required an oven, so they were a new thing for the Korean students to try out. I had also prepared a vocabulary list beforehand, with words concentrating on places and traveling.
The pizza turned out very delicious, and everyone was looking forward to baking the cake afterwards. I let Haley and Yeaeun do most of the work on the cake, since they hadn’t made one before at home and were excited to try it out. Every step of the process was interesting to them. The baking process went really well, and the cake turned out delicious!
It’s really interesting for me to see how even such simple things (like an oven) can be a big deal to people who don’t have access to one. I cook food in an oven a lot, and take it for granted that I have one since I’ve had access to it all my life. Yet making the pizza and baking the cake really showed me how different cooking can be in another culture, and how their cuisine has evolved because of it. We ended up talking a lot about cakes, and how in Korea people buy them from the store and they’re an expensive delicacy there. In Finland, I could bake one every day if I wished, and the basic ingredients aren’t expensive at all.
With our hunger sated, we started going over the vocabulary. I had chosen words that had risen up in our earlier conversations, and which would be useful when going around Finland. In retrospect, it would’ve been better to have these words the first thing, so they would have time to use and practice them more. Traveling related words are usually the most important words in a new language, especially if you need to get around in that country. Anyway, we had a long discussion about transportation, and different kinds of stores and public facilities in both countries. Asking directions in another language was still a little tricky, so we just concentrated on the names of places and recognizing them when traveling.
Here is the document for the third lesson: finnishlesson3
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