Seoul Tour and School Festival

The week after the ~Ing Conference passed very slowly and uneventfully. But, boy, let me tell ya, last week was crazy full of stuff. The weekend of the 19th my Rotary district had our Seoul tour. We went to loads of different places in just two days.

Saturday morning we met at a subway station exit and then all crammed into two vans with our bags and drove into Seoul. I honestly can't remember in what order we went to places I just remember where we went. So I'm just going to give a quick blurb about all of them.

Bea

We  first visited Gyeongbokgung Palace, which was so amazingly beautiful. The architecture and the painting on all the buildings was so incredible, as well as the huge mountains in the background. Mari and I wandered around for about an hour just taking pictures and taking it all in. I was having one of those "I can't believe I'm really living Korea" days. As a group we also walked through the area nearby and saw all the old and expensive houses (but still packed very closely). It was very nice and relaxing to just walk and chat with people and start to get to know some of the people in my district more. We also ate lunch in that area. We had bulgogi at a restaurant that had been making it for thirty years. In Korea, most restaurants only serve a few different dishes of the same type of food. If you want a different kind of food you have to go to a different place. So, these people had been making only bulgogi for forever and it was amazing.

We also saw The Blue House, which is the Korean version of the White House. The whole house isn't blue, just the roof. We didn't go in or get very close, but we went through a little museum that told a little of the history of Korea which was interesting.
In the afternoon we went to Insa-dong, the traditional area of Seoul (if you remember from my last post) which wasn't very interesting to me, as I had gone there during the conference and it isn't very big. But I did go down a sidestreet I hadn't seen before and bought a really cute sweater for only around nine dollars. Score! And I finally tried the Turkish ice cream that you can get various places in Seoul. It was delicious.

That night we made our own dinner of Samgyupsal (basically thick bacon) at our hotel. I ate so much meat, it was just ridiculous. But it was just so good I couldn't stop. We just spent the night hanging out and then around eleven Hohyun (our district coordinator) pulled out the birthday cake and everyone sang to me in all their different languages. That was really cool.
Sunday wasn't so much of a "let's see important parts of Korean culture" day as a "let's go shopping" day, which was totally okay with me. We walked around a few different areas of Seoul and I bought two more sweaters really cheap, while Anna was only concerned with Obama socks hahaha. Her enthusiasm for them was quite amusing. One of the places we went to was Itaewon, which is basically the foreigner area, so all the people working there could speak English and there were a ton of white people. It was really strange, to be honest. I've gotten really used to seeing Asians everywhere and it was a bit disconcerting to see so many westerners. We ate lunch at Taco Bell and everyone was super excited about eating western food but I just wanted some rice and seaweed man. Tacos are not my favorite food to say the least.

So, most of Sunday was pretty relaxing and just walking around. But Sunday night was much more exciting. We ate a buffet (yes!) that had more not-Korean food that was really good. Then we went on a cruise on the Han River. For those of you who don't know, there is a particular bridge that crosses that river that has really cool shoots of water that come out of it with colored lights behind them. It's really pretty at night. Also, it was one of the first Korean landmarks I ever learned about like three years ago and have wanted to see it since, so it was pretty emotional for me that I was actually looking at the lights I had seen in my first K-drama. Afterwards we were going to go to Namsan Tower, another popular tourist place, but we didn't feel like climbing all the stairs so we instead went to a different place that had a beautiful high-up view of Seoul. We got back really late and all crashed pretty much right away.
The next morning all we did was drive back to the station and say goodbye. We were all super exhausted and just wanted to go home and take a nap. It was also a bit of a sad goodbye because one of our French students, Justine, left the Wednesday after, so it was the last time most of us would see her. We'll miss you sweetie!

Even though the Seoul trip was fun, my most exciting news comes from elsewhere. I finally made friends! Woot woot! To explain how it all happened I need to start from the beginning of our school festival, Wednesday morning. Our school festival was basically an opening ceremony, mornings of wandering around looking at all the various tables set up, and afternoons of various forms of entertainment in the auditorium/gym. It was Wednesday and Thursday. Wednesday afternoon was quite interesting. Right before lunch my English teacher (who has very good English) came up to me and asked me if I was ready for the performance that afternoon. I didn't know if he meant me or someone else so I asked and he told me I could be in the talent show if I wanted. With no prior preparation the only thing I could do was The Cup Song. It isn't that impressive in America anymore because everyone knows it and has heard it loads of times. But here it Korea they think it's the coolest thing ever. So I decided to go for it. Why not perform?
So after I ate lunch I went to the little room on the side where all the other performers were waiting. I just kind of stood there awkwardly for a little bit and listened to a couple people practicing and then a guy and a girl invited me to sit by them and attempted to talk to me in a strange mix of Korean and English. And that is where I made my very first friend at school: Sanghoon. Also, after the talent show I had a ton of people walk up to me and say "Sing...good very good" with a thumbs up and then kind of run away because they were really shy and couldn't say anything in English. It was so funny. After school ended that day I did not go home. I stayed at school until around seven because we had to practice our dancing. Friday was our Sports Day and each major had to prepare a dance and a flag routine for the competition. So we practiced for a long time. I woke up the next morning with very sore legs....
Thursday was pretty boring as I had already seen all the tables and eaten all the food the day before (which consisted of various art, computer, electronic and food projects made by the students) and spent most of the morning sitting at the face painting table with Sanghoon and his friends. The afternoon, on the other hand, was very interesting. It started out with a magician who did this really cool dance with a mask on and changed the mask instantly over and over (among other tricks). After that was the..... I don't know what to call it. A man pageant? But not really. It was about nine guys dressed up as girls who danced and answered questions and tried to win first prize. But I'm not quite sure what it was based on as I didn't understand what they were saying. That night we practiced our dance as well but not as long. Thank goodness, I don't think I could have stood hearing the girly song we were dancing to any longer than I did.

Friday was definitely the most fun day of the three. We spent the whole day outside participating in various competitions and cheering our major on. My major, design, did very well. We won most of the races, we won ssireum (Korean wrestling), and a few other things. Sadly though my class lost our tug of war match. Stupid strong guys in the mechanics major....At least the guys from the red major (each has it's own color) were cheering us on as we tried our best. Good job Yongin! You guys deserve your win! (I'll explain about Yongin in a little bit, just have patience). That was the only sports competition that our whole class participated in. I, on the other hand, was pressured into trying ssireum by my homeroom teacher. I'm glad I was though. It was super hard but I won and afterwards everyone who watched was totally amazed that a foreigner could do it. I also spent more time with Sanghoon that day and met a couple other people I briefly chatted with. It was just a really fun exciting day. But that was only the beginning of my new found joy of having friends.
Saturday was wonderful as well. Sanghoon invited me to hang out with him and a couple other friends for the afternoon and go out for dinner. So I met him and we hung out at the library while we waited for Soomin to finish studying. Then the three of us walked and met Yein. We then all went into a little restaurant and had Dukkbokki, spicy rice cakes, and kimbab (it looks like sushi but tastes nothing like it). After that I had been planning on going home, buuuttt, my new friends asked me if I wanted to go to their church's worship practice, to which I of course said yes. When we arrived there was only one other guy who was really surprised to see me but super sweet and welcoming. Other people slowly trickled in and were also surprised to see me and often shy until we had maybe ten or twelve people. They were all so nice and inquisitive and tried their best to make sure I always knew what was going on. I could tell they were a really close-knit group but they took me right in and made me feel like a part of it. After they practiced their songs they put the chairs in a circle and started talking about God stuff that I didn't understand and then they prayed. Wow. I have never seen prayer like that. I knew that Koreans all prayed out loud at the same time, but I have never heard so few people make so much noise. The passion they had was incredible. They prayed for over half an hour and most of the girls were crying at least a little by the end of it. I was crying as well, but that was just because I was so happy to finally be with a group of people who love God just as much as I do.
Sunday I went back to my new church for the actual service (it was only about fifty people, almost all high school and college aged), after which I talked with a very nice lady (in English) about myself and how long I would be in Korea and things like that. In a week or two I'm going to join one of the small study groups that meets after the service. So excited!
After I ate lunch there, I went to my second church. This church is much bigger and has a couple Korean services, a high school, a college, and an English service. I (obviously) go to the English one. I appear to be the only teenager and only white person (there are lots of people from Africa, especially Nigeria and Cameroon) but I've made a couple of really nice friends there. Before the service this week I had a tutoring session with a ten year who has amazing English skills. I helped her prepare a presentation for an English competition, which she is well capable of winning. Seriously, how can a ten year speak a foreign language that well, without having lived in a country where they speak it? She's so good. After that I talked with my friend Christine (don't know what her real name is...) and she said she knows some people at church who teach Korean, so hopefully I can start learning at my level soon.

That evening was also eventful. Thursday my host sister who is living in France right now messaged me on Kakao and said that a couple of her friends wanted to meet me. So we made a group chat and talked for a long time (half of my messages were question marks) and decided to meet Sunday night. That was where I met Yongin, Minha and Yoojin. They were all super nice and their English was pretty funny. None of them speak it well. But I am very proud to say that most of the time I didn't need it. I understood probably about eighty percent of what they said the whole night. All we did was eat dinner and then stop at a café on they way home and chatted but it was a lot of fun. I've really learned here that you don't have to actually do anything special for the time spent with people to be special. The fact that I was with friends at all and that they wanted to know me was all that mattered.  "It was only a sunny smile, and little it cost in the giving, but like morning light it scattered the night and made the day worth living." (F Scott Fitzgerald). That pretty much sums up how I look at my friendships. If we're all smiling just because we're with each other it doesn't matter what we do. And I can happily say that I now have numerous friends my own age, thankfully most of which are Christians. I also met my new group of church friends last night and we went biking and ate fries at Lotteria (the Korean McDonalds). So, despite school being in general very boring, I'm incredibly happy at the moment. I truly love my life here and can't wait for the new adventures that are waiting for me in the coming weeks.
Until next time!

The ~Ing Conference

I lied.

I'm sorry. I said that the next blog post would be a list of differences between the US and Korea. But then the ~Ing Conference happened. So I'm going to tell you about that instead.

Day 1: Sunday Night

We (all the exchange students in our district except two) arrived at Suwon Station at 4pm. There we met a couple Koreans and a Canadian and then we all got on the bus and headed towards Gyeonggi University, where much of the conference would take place. On our walk up the hill to the right building we met a guy from Cameroon who was also a part of the conference (there are a lot of people from Cameroon in Korea). When we arrived we went into the cafeteria (that had the very interesting name of "Kyonggi Dream Foodteria") and met a ton more people from all over the place. We sat at tables according to our teams. The three teams were Politics, Science, and Arts and Culture. I was in Politics. I didn't want to be, but that's just the way it worked out. In the end I was really happy with my team. So then we spent the rest of night hanging out, eating dinner and getting to know each other. It will take a bit to list everyone on my team, but I will be mentioning them a lot and would like to use their names, not their nationalities. My team had four other Americans, all Rotary students like me, but three of them were new faces to me because they are in different districts. There were two Germans, one of them being Benedikt (I already knew him well, he's in my district) and Arne (not Arnie) who was just in Korea for the conference. There was one girl from Poland, Julia. There was a guy, Fernando, and a girl, Laryssa, from Brazil. There was one guy, Kah Ming, from Singapore. There was one guy, Middle, from China (that's the English translation of his name). There was one guy from Canada, Matika. There was a guy and girl from Mexico, Edraz and Mari. They are both in my district as well. There were also three Korean guys and five Korean girls. There were also people on other teams from places like Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Finland and the Philippines.

Hyojung Jiyoung Arne Matika
Middle and Mr. Wang

After we finished dinner and had exchanged pins and things like that we rode the bus to the hotel/resort we would be staying at the next five nights. I was in a room with Mari and two Korean girls, Eunjung and Doori. All three of them basically became my best friends by the end of the conference. They're all just wonderful adorable girls. The room we were in was a nice size with a really pretty view out the window. The only downside was that there weren't any beds. We slept on futons on the floor.

Day 2: Monday

The first morning we had breakfast at the hotel at seven. We then sat in the lobby and waited until maybe eight thirty for the buses to come to take us back to the university. When we got there we split up into our teams and went to separate rooms. Then a few different people gave presentations about various political and human rights subjects. They were all options for the topic we would choose for our final presentation . Then we had to go and sit through the opening ceremony for the conference. There was a performance by the universities band in the beginning. It was interesting. They were a rock band, and they were good, but the singer was very flat the whole time. Then we sat through a couple speeches that took a long time because they were given in Korean and then translated into English. 

After that we got back together with our groups and for a couple hours decided which topics we would present on (one for politics and one for human rights) and started organizing our powerpoint. We ended up choosing the topics of youth political participation and humanitarian intervention. After that we had dinner and went back to the hotel. Once we got there we had a little bit of time to rest, but then we got together with our teams again and started typing the powerpoint and practicing a couple of the more theatrical things we had planned. We went to bed really late.

Day 3: Tuesday

Tuesday we didn't do much with our groups and our presentation and we didn't go to the university. Instead we listened to three different lectures at the hotel. The first was about art. It was in Korean and translated into English by this really cool Korean lady who had a British accent. I found it to be pretty boring, considering it took a long time to say anything and I didn't agree with a lot of the things he was saying about various pieces of art. After a short break we then sat through a lecture about criminal...stuff. I don't really know how to explain it. It was basically whether the things most people think will stop crime really will. Then we ate lunch and then went back for the last lecture. This one way by a former Korean Congressman (I think) who was paralyzed from the neck down because of an accident. So he basically told us his story and talked about people not accepting people with handicaps as leaders. But every story he told he told with extreme detail and he spoke very slowly and it had to be translated so it was very long and boring. Try as hard as I could, my attention would just not stay focused.

Afterwards we all hopped on the buses and we were taken to a Buddhist temple. It was the first one I had been to so it was pretty cool, despite the fact that it was raining. The architecture and painting was beautiful. We were only there for a short time and were taking a ton of pictures, so I didn't get much of a chance to look at the inside of the temple.

When we got back to the hotel we just ate dinner and worked on our presentation more. And went to bed really late (in case you haven't caught on yet, that happened every night, so I'll stop mentioning it).

Day 4: Wednesday

In the morning we went to the university and practiced our presentation for about two hours and ironed the last details out (as much as we could anyway). Then after lunch we gave our presentation. The science team did theirs on recycling, and the culture team did theirs on eastern assumptions of western culture and vice versa. I thought that everyone did an amazing job, especially considering topics like humanitarian intervention are hard enough to talk about in your own language, let alone one that you don't speak very well (Most of the people there had very good English, but not all of them).

Then we headed into Seoul! It was my first time there, so I was very excited. First we hate Samgyupsal, which is basically pork belly that you grill at the table and then wrap in lettuce along with whatever sauce and vegetables you want. Or you can eat it like me and just dip the meat in salt XD. It was fun to teach Laryssa how to cook and eat in properly.

Then we went into the part of Seoul called Insa-dong. It's the area of Seoul that is very traditional. So there were a ton of shops filled with hanboks and fans and traditional tea sets ad silverware and stuff like that. Insa-dong and Jeju Island are the two biggest tourist areas in Korea so most of the people working at the shops could speak English, which was really helpful. I ended up spending most of the time alone, but that was on purpose. It was nice to just enjoy what I wanted to see all by myself and have a break from the people I had been seeing constantly for the past four days. I ended up buying myself a pretty green bracelet to go with the one I bought at the temple and a fan. I also have a fan from Spain and a fan from Japan, so I'm glad I have one from here now.

We were told to be back at the university by ten thirty and that the buses would be leaving at eleven so we left Insa-dong at around nine to get back in time. We went a different route back and ended up waiting about half an hour for our bus. I spent that whole time just chatting with Kah Ming about my childhood. We somehow got on the topic of horses and how my mum owns five, and then he asked me about my other pets in America and it turned into a very long conversation full of laughs. It was a nice end to a rather stressful outing. We got the university about fifteen minutes late, but it didn't really matter. The buses were about thirty minutes late anyway. But then it turned out that there wasn't quite room for everyone on the first round. I originally was going to go first, but I gave up my spot for Julia. So I ended up standing on my sore feet a bit longer. When we finally got on a bus I sat with Kah Ming and we talked the whole forty five minutes ride home. We got back to the hotel about ten minutes after midnight and on the bus I had told Kah Ming that it was my birthday. Right before we got off the bus I saw him talking to Matika and I was thinking "they're planning something aren't they?". I was totally exhausted and had had a tiring day so it was super sweet that when we got to the lobby of the hotel Matika got everyone's attention and they all sang me happy birthday. It was a really good way to end the day before I crashed in bed and fell asleep in about thirty seconds.

Day 5: Thursday

In the morning I went to breakfast alone and was almost the only one there. It was really fun as tired people trickled in they would say hi to me and then stare at me for a second as if they had forgotten something and they would say "Oh! Happy Birthday!" It was pretty funny. And throughout the day Coraline and Gi Oon told me Happy Birthday every time they saw me.

The first thing we did was take a two hour bus ride up to the border of North and South Korea. So I literally looked out over this big valley and could see North Korea on the other side. We also went in this tunnel underground, but it was low ceilinged and wet and in the end just hurt my legs. Then we ate lunch in a park nearby and then were on the bus another two hours back to the university. I slept on the way there and on the way back.

In the afternoon we had the closing ceremony. There was another couple boring speeches and then there was a few rewards given. Then we were all left in suspense as the lady waited to tell us which team had been the best and won the outstanding team award. Sadly, it was not my team that won, but the science team. But it was all so much fun that I really didn't care one bit whether we won or not.  

Then went back to the Dream Foodteria for our last dinner together. It was really sad because some of the people were leaving that night and not the morning after. It was really sad for me because it was almost over and I didn't really want to go back to school where I don't really have any friends. For almost a whole week I had lots of good friends, and I had to leave them all behind. But it was nice all the same. And Mari surprised me with a beautiful birthday cake. It was just a couple little cake snack things stacked with the words "H.B Emy" in jelly on them, but it was amazing anyway. She brought it out and everyone sang to me and it made me cry I was so happy. Everyone was like "don't cry!" and I just tried to tell them that it really was because of joy. They didn't really believe me. I could have cried about the things I was sad about but I stopped myself. “Somewhere, far down, there was an itch in his heart, but he made it a point not to scratch it. He was afraid of what might come leaking out.” (Markus Zusak).

After dinner we had some teary goodbyes and lots of hugs and a slow ride back to the hotel. The night each team had their own little parties in separate rooms. My team just ordered chicken and played two truths and a lie to get to know each other a little bit better. I stayed up until maybe around two thirty in the morning and only slept for about four or five hours. A lot of other people were up a lot later than I was.

Day 6: Friday

This day pretty much just consisted of us sitting in the hotel lobby getting lots of pictures and saying goodbye to people and giving everyone hugs. The bus ride to Suwon station was really quiet and sad. A few of us ate lunch together, but after that it was really over and I just wanted to get home and sleep. So I did. I went to bed around midnight after putting all my pictures on facebook and friending all of my new friends. On Saturday I woke up at around noon and decided I was still tired and could sleep a bit more and then woke up again at five. That was the latest I have ever gotten up in my life. The day felt like such a waste, but I felt so good to make up all that sleep.

So, basically, the conference was one of the best experiences of my life and I will never forget the friends I made there. All the time in between I didn't mention here was just filled with talking to people and learning about each others cultures. My closest new friends ended up being my roommates, Matika, Kah Ming, and Nicole and Jenny from America. Shout out to you guys, you all rock! You'd better come visit me again!

I would also like to briefly mention that I am now going to a church with an English service and have friends there. But I'll talk more about that in a later post. This one is too long anyway. Until next time!

A Concert, A Class, A Conference

To quote Olan Rogers, it's been awhile since I told you a story.

Juan

Not much has been happening lately that's out of the ordinary, except for last Saturday. That was the day I got to go to a Kpop concert! Although, the Kpop part of it was amazing, the rest of it was pretty boring. The concert was part of a sports festival so we also had to sit through a really long parade of all the different participating cities showing off their talents and weird costumes. There were also a couple singers that I didn't like because they sang old people music that was kind of annoying. But when the last three bands sang (2AM, Ze:a, MBlaq) I will shamelessly admit that I freaked the heck out. There was a lot of screaming, very loud singing and clapping. The two Taiwanese guys with me, Juan and Guan Yu, kept looking at me like I was a little crazy, but I didn't care. I had dreamed of this day for almost three years. MBlaq is my absolute favorite Kpop band, so this was an incredible experience for me. It was definitely worth the couple hours worth of waiting to see them. It was even worth the fact that I was freezing the whole time in a t-shirt and shorts sitting in the rain.

On other things not so exciting, I'll start with some school stuff. The past couple weeks have been really boring because this week and next Monday are the midterm exams. So the week before we didn't really have classes, the students just studied on their own. So Coraline and I just slept, read, or chatted with our teachers. We asked if we could be exempt from the tests, seeing as we wouldn't understand any of it, but the principle said that we had to take the tests, so we did. Each test took me about thirty seconds, except math, which I actually tried to do well. Apparently I actually did better than some of my classmates on that one, which surprised me. I still don't really have any friends to speak of in my class, but I am a lot more comfortable with talking to them and asking them questions at this point. I'm also now a lot more familiar with the building and the way things work. And there was one class when all the other students were studying and my Korean teacher started folding some school newspapers. She had a huge stack so Coraline and I decided to help her. We spent about and hour and a half doing it and afterwards our teacher kept saying "Thank you, thank you, I love you!" It felt really good to actually do something in class for a change and show our teacher that we aren't opposed to work we just can't understand what she teaches.

But this Thursday we didn't have school on account of a holiday. I wish I could tell you what holiday it was, but I can't. And yes, I asked what it was, but no one could tell me in English. But we got a day off school so it was nice. I spent the day with all the exchange students here in Ansan, Jack, Kaytleen, Coraline, Juan and Benedikt. First we went out to lunch at Lotteria, which is the Korean version of McD's (even though they have that too). Seriously, they're exactly the same, except McDonald's fries are better. This time I decided I would try one of the Korean items on the menu and got a Bulgogi burger. It was really sweet and pretty strange, but it was really good. After that we went upstairs to the movie theater. We wanted to see a movie in English, as none of us speak Korean that well, and there were only two choices: Prisoners and Monsters University. Prisoners was playing to late, so we chose the latter. And when the movie started we were all disappointed because it was dubbed in Korean. We had expected it to just have subtitles because all the other English movies we had seen had done it that way. But I guess they actually take the time to dub animations. Thankfully it was easy enough to follow and I understood maybe about a fifth of what they said so it was good anyway. Afterwards we went out for ice cream at Baskin Robins and then went home. It was a nice relaxing day with friends.





Sunggyeol University

Hannah, Juan, Me, EunMi

To tell you what happened today I need to backtrack a week. Last Friday we had our first Korean class with the Rotary club. It was at Sunggyeol University in Anyang, about an hour away by subway from where I live. Last week wasn't really a class, we just introduced ourselves and met our teachers and figured out which class we would be in. This week we actually started learning Korean. I was put in the higher level class because there are still some people here who can't even read Korean so we were separated. At the beginning of the class we were pretty organized and our teachers (who are college students) figured out what level we're at.

But as it went on we didn't really follow the book anymore and most of us were trying to figure things out on our own and it was kinda crazy. I also felt like there should have been more classes of different levels. Me and two other people were listening to our teacher and thinking "we already know of this" while others in our class were thinking "this is way too much to take in". I did learn a couple new things, but that was only because I was talking to Hannah one on one while the teachers helped other people. After the class we all got together and were told that we were going to learn a dance for the district conference in November. I, of course, was not too happy with this, but not all the songs we chose were bad. We're going to dance to sections of about four songs for a total of ten minutes. The only song I was unhappy with was Gangnam Style. So, of course, that's the one we started with. It was the most horrible dance lesson ever. All we did was watch a mirrored version of the dance. We didn't have anyone break it down for us and show us how. We were also in a very cramped space and couldn't move properly. It was just terrible.

On a happier note, the coming couple of weeks are going to be wonderful. This Sunday I am going to go to a different church, one with an English service! Benedict and Kaytleen go there and told me that there are a lot of black people and a lot of Russians, so it should be fun. After that I'm going to go to Gyeonggi University in Suwon for the beginning of the ~Ing Conference. I'm not really sure what the conference is about, but I have a schedule and it's going to be a fun five days (yes five days). The things were are doing include going to the DMZ, seeing some traditional drum performances and seeing some parts of Seoul. And my birthday will be right in the middle of it, which will be cool. I also really look forward to meeting the Rotary students from other districts that are going. The weekend after the conference our district is going on our Seoul tour which will be awesome (except for the fact that we have to walk everywhere).

So, I'm sure a lot of you reading this know what my Wall of Stuff was, but for those of you who don't, when I was in America on one of the walls in my room I hung up anything that I possibly could, from movie tickets to postcards to clothing tags, to chronicle the my life, manifested in the things I received throughout the years. By the time I left it covered over half of my room walls. I would love to do the same thing here in Korea, but I'm going to be living in three different houses and I don't think my parents would appreciate it, so instead I have a sturdy Notebook of Stuff. The front cover is already almost full, so then I'll move to the back and then the inside. If it gets too crowded I'll probably just start layering things. It's going to be one heavy notebook by the end of the year, but it will be a great way to show everything that happened to be over the year piece by piece.

Even though things have been going well and I'm excited for the next month there are also quite a few things that have been hard. It's difficult for me not to have any close friends, or any Korean friends really at all. It's also incredibly frustrating when I have something important I need to tell my parents, but I don't know how. It's kind of like this: "The sun was trembling on the brink of the world, the shadows at their longest...". The sun is still out and the light is shining, but there are long shadows that pierce that happiness.

I have pointed out a few of the differences between America and Korea at various points throughout my blogs, but it's been very scattered and I'm sure I've left out a lot, so my next post is going to be a clear lists of differences. Hopefully I'll finish that in the next couple days. Until then!