Of Jackie Chan & Ping Pong

We are official Chinese Language Students! As of today we've sat through four days of classes = 16 hours, 5 teachers, & 9 fellow Korean students.
Our first day of class we were scheduled to take Spoken Chinese and Beginner's Reading; 8 am to 12 pm. Knowing we'd have trouble with the reading course because, well, we don't know any chinese characters, we knew the speaking course would be beneficial so it sounded like an O.K. morning. So we get our classroom, which by the way is in the same building as the Korean student's dorm (interesting tidbit of information for later on in the story...), to discover we are enrolled in Beginner's Chinese with nine Korean students, all of whom speak some english and a lot of Chinese. Since they've been learning characters in their own language for all of their life they've pretty much mastered Chinese characters as well. So of course they along with all of our teachers are baffled that we can't read chinese characters. The first class might have been more beneficial had we not been on the wrong page for the majority of the class time. We just thought we were having trouble following along, only to discover when called upon to read the chinese characters that we were on the wrong page. The Korean's, though really nice and helpful, unfortunately are at the maturity level of a 14 year old so they just point and giggle and ask us if we know Tom Cruise (to which Brandon replied, "Do you know Jackie Chan?") The second class is being taught by a guy who doesn't speak any english, loves to talk about beer and has a tendency to ramble on about stuff we can't understand...but then again sometimes we can't really tell he's rambling because at this point it all sounds like mumbo jumbo. This class is the one that is by far the most pointless for us because it's all about reading characters. For the majority of the class he had the Koreans reading the same paragraph over and over. Then after they read through it 13 times or so he called on one of them to see if he knew it by memory, which of course he did. Then the teacher calls on Brandon to recite it from memory! (I guess it wasn't obvious to the guy that we didn't understand what was going on when we weren't reading it any of the 13 times) So then Brandon laughs and says, "Bu keyi." Meaning = No, I can't. And then in a desperate and pleading voice he looks at the teacher with puppy dog eyes and says, "Look, I just wanna know how to tell the taxi to turn left." And of course at this point all the Koreans just giggle and point.
It's not all that bad though. We do have three classes that will be really helpful and we just don't show up for the other ones because they'd be a waste of time. The Koreans think we're a bunch of slackers. However, we have managed to impress them with our food ordering skills and expertise in Ping Pong. We went out to eat lunch with all of them yesterday during which I mentioned that Brandon was a wrestling state champion. They now prefer to call him "Texas Champion" haha. Then afterwards we went back to their dorm/classroom building to have a little game of Ping Pong. I totally thought we were gonna get smoked, because everyone knows that Asians are killer ping pong players. Lo and behold...we Americans are moving up in the Ping Pong world. I now am the chosen favorite when we play doubles.
It's been an interesting week and we really have learned a lot in just four days. Yesterday I successfully had a 2 minute conversation with a five year old! woohoo!