I met my conversation partner for the first time last night. His name is Jaehoon Yun - Jay for short - and he's from South Korea. He's majoring in English Literature and thinking about going on to get his Masters in Business afterward, but he hasn't made up his mind about that yet.
We talked a little bit about where we're from - he's from Incheon, South Korea, which is where South Korea's international airport is located, so they get a lot of tourist traffic. He was telling me that he thinks South Korea's probably only about half the size of Texas - I went and compared the areas, and apparently Texas is more than twice as big as South Korea.
We spent most of our time talking about different ways to meet people and make friends, because he said that he'd really like to make some American friends. He lives in an apartment off-campus, so he doesn't really get the chance to hear about all the things that are going on on campus all the time. I told him that the best thing I could think of for him to do is to get involved, join some sort of club or organization. We talked for a while about the different things he might be interested in that we have clubs for on campus, but my knowledge of the different organizations here is far less than encyclopedic.
We had a few troubles with the language and culture barrier - the most problematic, I think, was when I was trying to figure out a way to describe the marching band. It's a very different sort of concept when you haven't grown up with that sort of thing, and I didn't know if there was any sort of parallel in South Korean culture.
