Keira CP #1

Keira CP #1

Date/Time: May 8th, 2017 - 3:00 pm
Location: Starbucks (Tennessee St.)

Seongeun and I arranged over text message to meet at Starbucks at my suggestion, because I am still rather new to Tallahassee and I don't know a lot of places to meet up yet. I also thought this would make our first meeting a little less potentially awkward; I always feel a little more at ease in a café or coffeeshop, and she seemed enthusiastic about it, too. We actually had the chance to meet for the first time a little earlier in the day, because she was a student in one of the classes I observed in the morning. This made meeting up later even less intimidating. We spent the first part of our Starbucks conversation just getting to know the basics about each other and chatting. Seongeun asked if I could recommend some American drama and comedy TV shows to her, preferably ones that would be somewhat easy to listen to. I was reminded of how little current American television I watch, and I told her about how I like watching Korean dramas. We talked about how I'd like to teach in Korea, and how I find the language beautiful and would love to learn to understand and speak it. She and I are both a little shy, though, so eventually when our conversation started to stutter out, she suggested we try the Conversation Partner activity that had been sent to our emails. 

The activity involved writing words connecting to our names which describe how we view and describe ourselves. Mine included aunt, girlfriend, graduate, artist, and, less formally, bookworm and nerd/geek. This offered a fun segue for me to explain some colloquial terms, which proved to be more challenging than I had expected. We also found some common ground through this activity, as we discovered we both enjoy watching movies and spending too much time on the Internet. After my admittedly less-than-concise explanation, she even wrote "nerd" over one of her own self-descriptions, and we shared a laugh.