Week 6: Seoul Travels and Finals

I am a little late in my update for this week, but I have good reasons which are to follow shortly.

This is me with the Kimbap I made :)

Last weekend I visited Cheonju with some other ETA's and took a cooking class.  We learned how to make bulgogi (a beef dish with veggies) and kimbap, which is awesome.  It is laver (dried seaweed flattened and cut into a square shape) with a layer of rice on it, then long pieces of veggies, egg, and processed meats are laid in the middle and then the whole thing is rolled up.  Then you cut the now cylindrical shape into smaller pieces.  It is really tasty and pretty healthy ^_^

So the main entrance to this place said that this was "Times Square" ^_^

Afterward I caught a bus to Seoul and met up with my former roomy, Taekeum.  Before we met I hung out by myself and wondered one of the biggest malls I've ever seen.  Not only architecturally beautiful, but also diverse and interesting.  The mall was connected to a huge department store on one side, which indirectly connected to the subway station.  Go figure.  This place was gorgeous though, I'll give it that.

This is where I first entered the Mall, its a side entrance, but wow.

This was a really strange art thing just outside the entrance to
"Times Square", made me wonder who thinks of this kind
of stuff?

This is just inside the Sauna about to head into the bath part.

Then I met Taekeum and we went to get some dinner--Chimac--which is Korean shorthand for chicken and beer haha.  We went to this cute hole in the wall chicken place that had a sale on chicken, all you can eat chicken with one glass of beer per person.  It actually turned out to be a little expensive, but it was tasty and it was provided a nice area for us to catch up on each other's news.  Goodness knows a girl's life can become pretty complicated after a while hahaha.  Then we stayed the night in a Sauna (actually it was a sauna we had stayed in last year together too hah)  It was great to chill and have a hot bath.

The next day we met up with our German friend who was touring Korea for a couple weeks and went to lunch with him.  I got to see his hostel and that was cool, because I've never been in one before.  It was a funny moment there too, because there was this Asian guy there who asked where everyone was from and low and behold the guy is of Chinese heritage, but grew up in Germany and the US so he speaks fluent German and English and not really Chinese or Korean.  I've never met a fluent German Asian person before.  Maybe that's a weird thing to say.  It was really cool.  That made a group 3 Korean speakers, 3 German speakers, and me.  Haha, good thing they all spoke English or I would have been really lost, the whole time.

After we hung out for a while I had to catch the bus back to Goesan and on the bus I met this really nice Korean guy who helped me study a little for my exam.  :) Now we're facebook friends and maybe later on we'll meet up again.  Then on the walk from the bus station to the school I met another guy who lives in Goesan who said he wanted to look out for me.  It was a nice night.  Jesus was lookin out.

This week was a really important week for me because my Korean language final exam was on Wednesday.  I was super stressed allllllll weekend and week leading up to it.  I thought for sure I would fail but now that it's over I feel a little better.  I feel like I killed the reading and writing part, but both speaking portions were a struggle for me.  It's not that I don't know the material or that I didn't learn it, its that I just froze up under pressure and I kept trying to think of complex sentences to say and it was just hard to do on the spot.  Either way I think I'll just make it over the goal line to pass.  I think I'm ready to enter my homestay and the like from a language stand point for sure.

This weekend we're going to Seoul.  Tomorrow we are visiting the DMZ and the American Ambassador's house for a pool party.  Then Saturday and Sunday are ours to do with as we choose.  On Saturday I'm not sure what I'm going to do yet, but on Sunday I'm going to visit the church I went to last year and then meet both of my former roommates for dinner ^_^  Finally, on Monday we have our graduation ceremony from the Korean language program.  We'll come back to Goesan Monday afternoon. And then next Wednesday we depart for our "new" lives.