My Best Friend

My Best Friend

When someone says "best friend" or "best friends", I always think about my friends from my ESL class in Boces. They all deserve the title "best friend". My thoughts also keep returning to the Czech republic, back in time, when I attended hight school. So I want to write about my new friends here, but also about my best friend from high scool.
My best friend, Iveta, (from the time we were teens)is the same age as me. We met at the entrance exam for the high school. It happened that she sat next to me. From that moment, we were sitting next to each other for the whole four years. We were wearing the same clothes and having the same hairstyle. We were doing the same mischief. We understood each other in everything. When we split, to spend vacation with our parents, we were both crying. We promised each other to stay in touch fot our whole lives. It should not matter, where we will live, with whom we will be married, we must stay in touch forever!
Today, she is living in the Czech Republic. When she met her husband, she changed. Mayby I changet a little too. But when I meet her today, it seems to me, that only I am sorry that we have not much to talk about anymore.
Now, let's talk about the new friends I have here in the U.S. Their names are Moon, Kim, and Clara, and they are also my classmates. They come from South Korea. Actually they were the first people who had the patience to listen to my unintelligible English, at the beginning. Still now, we all are going through the difficulty of the English language. Sometimes we don't uderstand when the Americans are talking, but we understand each other very well.
When I first met them, I thought there was a big difference between our cultures for us to be good friends. I found a lot of similarity but also a lot of differences in our behavior. When, for the first time, I was invited to Moons bithday party, I automatically took my shoes off. We were happy that we found something identical in our behavior. But later when I wanted Moon to open her birthday gifts in front of us, they all got confused. She opened them, but I think that she did not feel comfortable. Today I know that for a Korean, it is very impolite to open a gift in front of the giver. Nevertheless, they always open gifts they get from me. They do respect my culture like I am trying to respect theirs.
I am also trying to learn from them. They teach me their Korean language. They teach me how to cook Asian food. Sometimes they take me to Flushing, the Korean area of New York. We shop together in Korean stores where I have big difficulty understanding what I am putting in my shopping cart. Everything is written only in Korean. After shopping, we ofen go for lunch in one of the many Korean restaurants.
I enjoy being with my new friends. When we are together, we have a lot of fun. I think, sometimes, we are a little noisy. We are making jokes laughing like we were teens. They are very nice, gentle, and witty. I hope to stay in the U.S. for long time, so I can speak good Korean and also little English.