But before that, yay, I'm a proud Level 5 Sogang student now ^^! The one thing I love about Sogang is that grades come out the day after the final interview test. It's a nice way to prevent stress from piling up and dying of anxiety, knowing your results right away! After the final interview test, Henry, Xue Qing, and I went to a Wii Bang (again, love that there are bangs for everything!) to play Wii of course! Haha. It was a pretty fun experience seeing video games translated into Korean, something I've only seen in English and Japanese. Since I didn't bring my camera that day, I don't have any pictures to upload sadly though!
The next day was the graduation, which was actually cancelled because of swine flu...so instead we just did the routine of eating (for some reason not Korean food but) sandwiches in the classroom while getting our grades. 구은미 선생님 had us each give a one minute speech and when it came around to her, she actually cried while giving her speech! It was so sweet! We're all gonna miss her so much ㅠㅠ.
We had also made a gift for her--a cardboard with cutouts of all our faces in balloons, with messages that each of us had written, that the cutout of 구은미 선생님 was "holding"
After this tearful not really goodbye, we went to watch a play that some of the Level 4 students had prepared for the graduation (before it was cancelled). Needless to say, it was excellent! The basic plot line was about 한스 씨 (Hans), a level one student (played by our class' Akihiro) who had failed level 1 for 20 years nonstop. One day, a fairy appears and grants him three wishes. His first wish is to advance to level 2, but even after he does, he is still unpopular with the girls, so his second wish is to be popular with the girls. Of course, as many fairy tales of this kind go, his wishes backfire, and as he goes up to level 4 he also becomes a 바람둥이, that is, a player, and causes his own downfall, so in the end, his third wish is to just go back to his normal life, where he then decides to study level 1 once again. The acting was hilarious and the students used the latest pop music (Abracadabra, 거짓말, 소원을 말해 봐, etc.) to choreograph some dances that fit in with the plot. So fun!
Expressing the "둘이서 먹다가 하나가 죽어도 모를 만큼 맛있다" phrase from level 3 (It's so tasty that even if two people were eating and one were to die the other wouldn't know).
Going to 김 선생님 to reregister for Level 1 haha.
Alas, we never once took a full picture with all 16 classmates T_T!
That night we met up to eat samgyupsal and sing karaoke. Gonna miss her a lot T_T! But we still have the wedding to look forward to :D!On to the weekend in Taiwan!
Summary: Friday morning we woke up at 5AMish and got on the bus to Incheon. Of course, being the scatterbrain that I am, I realized just before getting to Incheon that I had forgotten my passport ahh! >_< So I hopped on a taxi back to my apartment to swipe my passport and get quickly back to Incheon. The taxi driver was really kind and went as fast as he could, allowing me 40 minutes to spare when I got to the airport. Unfortunately, the round trip ride cost me 100,000W, almost $100, ironically more expensive than the round trip tickets to Jeju I just bought for winter...I was amazed at how fast I got through security measures though--in less than 20 minutes, a feat that would never have happened in the US (I probably would have missed my flight). As soon as I asked the lady in the airport where to check-in, she sent me to the fast lane because of my impending flight time. It just amazes me how efficient Seoul can be--buildings get torn down and built in the span of a week, a subway line was built in the time after I left last summer and before I came back this summer (whereas in New York, the T line is going to take more than 10 years to build). I dunno what it is, bureaucracy? Work ethic differences? Who knows? But I appreciate it!
So we got into Taipei around 10:30AM, got to Eight Elephants Hostel by 1:30PMish, where we met the really kind hosts who showed us around the cozy hostel. Our first day, which was rather rainy, was spent seeing Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world (though we didn't go to the top, as there were clouds anyway) and then seeing Shida Night Market 師大夜市, where we had fat scallion cakes and smelly tofu 臭豆腐, which smelled extremely horrible but was actually quite delicious! We followed that up with a dessert of the Taiwanese version of patbingsu mm mm. Day 2 was spent exploring the National Palace Museum 國立故宫博物院 where we saw the world-famous carving of bokchoy from a single jade stone. The bokchoy was used as a dowry and represents the bride's purity, while the locusts on it represent her fertility. After the museum, we got full body and foot massages, which, needless to say, felt very good. Then because we were so tired we slept at 11PM. Day 3, we explored the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial 中正纪念堂, Bird Street 鳥街 (where many birds are sold), Longshan Temple 龍山寺, eating at the Modern Toilet (a restaurant which is themed like a bathroom), and exploring Ximen 西門, a popular district that reminds me a lot of Myeongdong. We then slept and woke up at 4:30AM and took a taxi in the dead of night to Taoyuan International Airport to get back to Seoul.
Reflections? Well I've gotta say that visiting Taiwan really gave me a new view of "home." My thoughts shortly after getting to Taipei were "Wow I really miss home" and before getting on the plane to go back "I'm happy to be going home." It's really interesting that I've come to see Seoul as a second home to me (I guess a third, since New Haven would technically be my second, but "third home" doesn't sound as powerful haha). While staying here for three months last year felt like a vacation, it really does feel like a new home this time around, and I was happy to go to sleep back in my bed in Seoul. Also using my first year Mandarin knowledge plus finagling through Cantonese to try to make possible Mandarin words/phrases was fun and very interesting to see what I could remember and how I could circumlocute to find vegetarian food for Sneha, get taxi drivers to take us to certain places, etc., but it was nice to be back in a country where I felt fairly comfortable with my language knowledge. But yes, first year language is very useful!
Another thing that going to Taiwan made me think about was whether I would like to live in Taipei when going back to Chinese in the future. I guess I'll have to compare it to Beijing and maybe other Chinese cities to see what I'd like. Taipei has a very peaceful atmosphere, which just gives me a calm sense of tranquility. Being able to wander around not too fast and see people enjoying their time leisurely with their children at the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial made me feel that I would enjoy living in Taipei, although the quietness may bore me after a while--considering that I come from a large city (New York). Seeing stores closed at random hours (then again it was a weekend) and the whole city shutting down at around 10PM, at which time it looked like Seoul at 4 or 5AM could be a bit too much quiet for me. Not to mention when we left at 4:30AM there was literally nothing in sight--almost no cars, and the air was the quietest I had ever heard in a large city.
Also, Taipei's air was very refreshing to smell--a much cleaner smell than Sinchon, a much more natural smell than the sterile smell of Gangnam. Maybe the fact that it had been raining and damp added to that natural smell, but the petrichor (a fun word I learned from listverse, a site I've become way too addicted to lately, that means "the good smell of damp air after the rain") was very soothing. Not to mention, Taipei was much warmer than Seoul, a fact that I was made very very aware off when I came back to Seoul and the cold air blasted in my face.
Who knows? Maybe I'll be writing from Taipei soon enough ^^.
Now for pictures!