LAZY UPDATE #11

I can't believe how fast the time has gone since mid-terms.  I am so not ready for finals, nor am I in the mood for studying like I was with my mid-terms.  These past few weeks have felt as though someone pressed fast-forward x32 on the remote control and everything has been such a blur.  A lot of stuff has been happening with my family coming over and me having to organise pretty much everything for their trip, which has made me stressed out - money, accomodation, travel fares, visas, finding out where to go - and then there's my visa and my dormitory accomodation for the summer and just everything has been building up and up.  I finally broke down on Friday because it was just all too much to handle, so hopefully now that I'm all cried out I can just focus on getting through the exams and into holidays!!!

So last Saturday (the last one in May) I went to watch a movie with a student from the Anseong campus of Chung Ang University.  She and I met during the Folk Village excursion a few months ago and we wanted to hang out in Seoul.  We had 삼게탕 samgyetang (herbal chicken) for lunch and then went to watch Kung Fu Panda 2.  It was my first time trying the chicken dish; ever since I came to Seoul I wanted to eat it.  It was okay.  The taste wasn't anything explosively amazing but it wasn't plain either.  KF2 was on the ordinary side as well.  I enjoyed the first one, but as with most sequels the second one wasn't the same.

Last Monday was my friend's birthday, and though he had celebrated it with drinks the night before, he wanted to do something on the actual day so a group of us went to the 찜질방 jjimjilbang (Korean sauna)! I didn't take any photos that night since I didn't know if it was appropriate to take my camera out, but it was a lot of fun.  There were lots of different kinds of saunas - some were super super hot and others were ice cold.     We also ate the hard-boiled eggs and drank 식혜 sikye (rice dessert drink) in the main common area.  It seriously felt like we were in drama.

On Thursday, me and my roommate decided to have a mini-party in our dorm room.  Both of us wanted to try 'take out' in our dorm room, whether it be pizza or chicken or a full meal, so we decided that Thursday would be the day.  I invited another friend to come along as well - she's Japanese but has studied Korean for three years - so we had three people.  We also had a cake because my roommate and I both had been craving for cake as well.

Friday night was the first time I stayed out after 1 am (our dormitory curfew is 1) and guess what I was doing? Shopping!! After our evening class, I didn't feel like going back to the dormitory so I asked a few of my friends to go shopping with me at Dongdaemun.  We went out at 10 pm and didn't come back until 6:30 am in the morning, but it was a lot of fun.  One of my friends' mum used to to own a clothes shop when she was young (my friend is Korean) so she knew the best places to go to for cheaper clothes.

What was really interesting about shopping that late/early was that it didn't feel like it was different from any other time.  When we got tired from shopping, we went to a cafe nearby to rest our legs and get a drink and it was packed.  Not just packed for 3 am in the morning but packed for any other normal time of the day.  And it wasn't only the cafe - the shopping complexes and streets were still full of people.

Today was Memorial Day, similar to ANZAC Day we have in Australia.  It's a public holiday so everyone has the day off.  Samil Church has this month-of-prayer thing where people go to morning service at 6.30 am everyday to pray for the church.  My leaders had been really promoting this event to everyone and though I was initially not going to go, I ended up going because a) it would be a welcome change from waking up late, b) they were going to watch a movie after the service and c) it would be something that I couldn't experience back home.  What I didn't expect were the amount of people who would turn up alongside with me.  The line of people could easily have been 1 km long - from the door of the church to the station exit of the subway.

The service was interesting, especially with the amount of people that were there.  After the service we had breakfast at the church, which was provided by the church.  We met up in our international fellowship group and then proceeded to go to the cinemas.  We split up into two groups - Kung Fu Panda 2 and X-Men: First Class - and went to our respective theatres. I'd been waiting to watch X-Men for a LONG time - my friends on Facebook would definitely know - so it was an easy choice for me.  And then we had dessert afterwards as a big group.

In other news: finals are next week.

LAZY UPDATE #3

It's amazing how fast time flies by here, and how comfortable I feel in Seoul when I compare it to when I was in Adelaide.  I remember when I was back from Hong Kong I wrote a post on how strange it felt to be 'home', because it didn't even feel like home.  When I'm walking around in Seoul, even though I'm not fluent in the language and I've never been here in my life, it feels like home. I know that you might think Oh, it's because you idolise the dramas and kpop singers, but that's not the reason why I like it here.  There's just a feeling of familiarity (no doubt due to the dramas) and ease when I look around here.

On Sunday I went  to Seoul International Baptist Church all by myself (no, I did not get lost).  The journey there was incredibly wet due to the persistent rain, which also made it extremely freezing.  I arrived there in the end though, with the help of three Filipino men who answered my questions in English.  The church was a mixture of foreign and local people.  I overheard a few conversations (yes, my speciality is pretending I'm absorbed in something else while actually listening intently) and a lot of the foreign people are English teachers.  It didn't really surprise me, because the only real jobs which foreign people who can't speak Korean can take part in are teaching jobs.  The pastor wasn't there that morning, so instead they had invited one of the church members to give his testimony which turned out to be really powerful.  If you ask me about it in person later on I'll tell you, but it's really too long to be written here.  I went back to the dormitory after church, but not before being trapped inside the subway station for half an hour....but that's a long story too.

Sunday night was when all the exchange students at CAU met up.  We went to a chicken place near the university and introduced ourselves to each other.  It was fun meeting all the new students.  It ended up being so loud in the restaurant that we were kind of yelling at each other across, even though we were sitting opposite each other on the table.  There was a lot of fried chicken, beer, and soju going on during the meet-up, which is pretty much the standard Korean meet-up I guess.  I left at around 10:30 because I was tired and wanted to sleep, but I think the others didn't leave until about 12:30 am.

Monday was a pretty long day.  I met up with my buddy an hour before our orientation to try and open a bank account, except it turns out that we can't open a bank account until we've been in the country for more than five days.  Or until the immigration office sends the word that we have officially entered the country.  Because I came on a Saturday, and public offices don't open on weekends (wow, I thought that was only Australia being lazy), my details hadn't gone through yet.  It was pretty disappointing, but what could I do? Absolutely nothing, so I went to buy food to eat before the orientation.  Orientation was informative but also long.  I did take a Korean-language test though, and now I'm going to register for the Intermediate Korean class. Yay, watching dramas paid off!

At night time, a group of us went out to 동대문 dongdaemun to eat dinner and have a look around.  We first went to a shopping complex called Doota, which is similar to the Mongkok shopping centres.  There are little stores of clothes, bags and shoes everywhere on each floor, each selling pretty similar stuff for similar (and high) prices.  We had only gone our separate ways in the mall - girls and boys group - for about ten minutes when the boys called us and said that they had seen all they needed.  I guess frills and laces aren't really their thing.  

We decided to walk to the older markets for the culture and food.  It was a twenty-minute walk, but I think because it was so cold that no one really noticed.  When we got there, all we could see were stalls and stalls of 순대 soondae (black sausages) and 족발 jokbal (pork hock) along with various other items which I don't know the names of.  We came upon this ahjumma selling pupa (yes, pupa.  Like larvae.  yes, larvae.), and bought a cup because some people were interested in tasting it.  It tasted like beans, but the texture was so .....ugh.  Not nice.  

Although we had eaten some street food beforehand, we were still hungry so we went into a little place where their speciality was 전 jeon.  It's kind of like a savoury pancake, and they make it with different ingredients like seafood or kimchi.  Apparently, the jeon and 막걸리 makgeolli (rice wine) are like peanut butter and jam (celery and cream cheese, cheese and crackers, yin and yang...) so five bottles of makgeolli were ordered and shared among the ten of us.  It was a fun night, but the dormitory curfew is 1 am so we came back by around 12.

And finally, yesterday!  Yesterday I spent the morning with three of the exchange students (one girl - Heidi and two guys - Gauthier and Pontus) looking at the fitness room behind our dorms and then introducing Modern Family to the two boys, who had never heard of the show before (because they're from Belgium and Sweden) and had thought that the show would be 'girly'.  I don't think so. The fitness room has a few machines inn it, some weights and yoga mats.  Heidi started teaching the two boys some moves in yoga, which then led to Pontus telling us that he was a former gymnast in Sweden! It's not longer just one new thing a day anymore here.  It's ten new things a minute.

After lunch, I went out to meet up with a friend who is studying at Ewha Girls University as an exchange student.  He (yes, he...they accept male exchange students for some reason) took me to a place in Yongsan were he needed to change his phone, and where I ended up renting my phone from as well.  We also ran into more exchange students from different universities, including a couple of girls who could speak Cantonese!  Like I said, ten new things.  After that we went to visit his university campus at Ewha.  The streets outside the campus are pretty much a girl haven -make up, clothes, shoes, bags, skin care, street food and coffee shops galore.

His university campus looked like something out of a fairytale.  The buildings were really historic-looking and looked even prettier because of the autumn-like surroundings.  He took me around the campus and showed me his dormitory.  It was nice, but my dormitories are nicer.  We met up with his sister and his friend for dinner, where we ate a buffet Korean barbeque.  It's very different to the buffet barbeque in Adelaide, where the meat they give you isn't really....nice.  Here the meat was the authentic fatty pork, beef, and pig skin.  We ate a lot tonight, but I haven't had meat in almost five days so it was nice to eat some again.

I really need to start updating more often.  This Lazy Update thing isn't really working because I write too much for each event - maybe I should change it to Congested Update?  I also need to start writing my personal devotions up again.  This isn't just supposed to be a diary of my physical life but also my spiritual life as well.

P.S. Oh! While we were walking around the streets outside Ewha, I saw 나르샤 Narsha, 서인영 Seo In Young and 선화 Sunhwa (from Secret) filming their variety show 'Heroes'.  They seemed to be doing some kind of cooking activity, but they were finishing up by the time I saw them.