First Day of School

I just had my first Korean class today.  I am taking classes from the Institue for Foreigners at one of the Universities here.  I am in the pre-beginner class so we are starting at the very basics.  Today we only covered the vowels.  Korean is supposed to be a very simple language and is quite phonetic (once you can actually recognize the various letters and vowels).  All of the characters and vowels look the same to me at this point... but I am slowly being able to pick out some letters. 
There are about 15 other people in my class, all foreigners.  A bunch of people from Japan (who speak no English), some Brittish people, a few other English teachers (from Canada or US), a woman from Ukraine, and then a few people from China.  Overall everyone seems to be able to speak English (minus the Japanese people and the teacher).  I very quickly realized how my more beginner students must feel in my classes with my lack of Korean.  The teacher had to be very creative in her directions to us to get us to do what she wanted.  The most difficult was hearing the minute differences in pronounciation.  For my ears the different sounds of 'ye' and 'ya' were almost identical but the teacher kept insisting we were saying it wrong.  I think it will require a bit of studying on the side, but my goal is to be able to comfortably read Korean (even if I don't know exactly what it says).  I have 10 weeks (20 classes) to accomplish that so I'm hopeful.  Well I am very excited to be starting these classes (even though it means my Mondays and Wednesdays are quite long days).  The other people in the class seem really interesting too so I'm sure I'll get to know them as well (even it requires a bit of miming to communicate with some of my classmates).

Korean Birthday

A couple of weeks ago my coworkers took me out for a delicious sashimi (raw fish) dinner to celebrate my birthday.  Here are a few pictures my boss took at the restaurant... unfortunately he only took these couple of ones so Ezke, Daniel and Charles (my other co-workers) didn't make it into any of the pictures, but they were there too.  I'll try to take some pictures during class sometime this week so you can see some of my students.

One of my co-teachers, Sharon.

One of my bosses, John

So much raw fish!  Notice all of the diferent side dishes as well... delicious!