Several meetings later

Hi all,

I will walk you through our first four awesome meetings with Anna with a post that is a bit longer in attempt to compensate for my initial inactivity (sorry about that).

First we met over a delicious meal of hot wings in the city. We discussed our preliminary plans and what each of us wants to get from the course. The plan was simple: Anna was going to teach me basic Korean words, expressions, customs and behaviour; and I was going to help her out with more advanced things in English. During that meeting we learned important things, like how to say cheers in Korean for example.

Our second meeting was the most awesome so far. We went to the Sky bar on top of the Sokos hotel. We got down to some serious language learning, coffee drinking and scenery observation. Anna showed me the Korean characters and we started practising reading and writing with simple words like mom, dad, hello and others.

After Anna showed me how to write in Korean, I showed her the Bulgarian alphabet and she was interested to learn that. It was lots of fun to talk in English and to write in Korean and Cyrillic. I showed her some basic words and she tried to read them out loud and I was amazed how fast she was catching on – way faster than I was with Korean. The top of my evening was when she could read Благодаря /blagodaria/, meaning Thank you in Bulgarian. Suddenly our plan changed and Anna was much more interested to learn things in Bulgarian. This is fine by me, because this way I can show her typical things for my language and country and she would still be improving her English skills as we are talking in English anyway.

The next two meetings we had in the kitchen in Lapinkaari. First Anna and a friend of hers cooked Japchae and a soup with egg and leek. It was all delicious and I can’t wait to show how it’s done to my friends and family back home in Bulgaria and the Netherlands. The other time I cooked for them some typical Bulgarian things. Lots of other people joined us for the meal and it was fun.

In a nutshell, I am really happy with our arrangement with Anna and I am looking forward to learning more and teaching more.