Lori CP-1

So, I met my conversation partner on Tuesday during Tea Time at CIES, and I can already tell she is going to be a lot of fun to get to know this summer. At first I was a bit nervous, and I think she was as well, but we quickly found we had a lot of common interests which made conversation much easier than I think we had expected.
Jae-yeon is my conversation partner, and she is from Bucheon, South Korea. Bucheon, mind you, is not to be confused with Bhutan, the country. Sometimes further clarification may be needed, a great place for this is Google maps =). After realizing we couldn't hear anything the other person was saying, we moved further from the rest of the groups and conversation became a lot easier. We both were full of questions for the other person, and our hour flew by pretty fast.
I learned about travel via metros in S. Korea. Bucheon is only about forty-five minutes from Seoul by subway. I also learned that we had traveled to a lot of the same cities in Europe.
After realizing we had similar smart phones, we found that conversation poured when showing each other photos of where we were from, and where we had traveled. Jae-yeon said that she loves photography, and was eager to become a better photographer and buy a DSLR camera. I love photography as well, and hope to take her to some local parks to perhaps practice or just hang out.
Overall, it went really well! I was really comfortable with her and am looking forward to hanging out again! There were a few instances where conversation didn't flow perfectly, or we didn't understand each other, but I think our eagerness to learn helped to overcome those moments and find other ways to communicate what we were trying to say. Hopefully I can help her learn more about English and the U.S., while at the same time increasing my understanding of the culture and peoples of the Republic of Korea.