바람을 쐴 겸 잘 됐다

"And we can get some fresh air too"

A line from one of the dramas we watched in video class, and what we decided to do for this (short) vacation. For our vacation, as midterms were near and we were only allotted four days of rest, we decided not to go anywhere far. Instead, we headed down to Yeouido Park to rent some bikes and go biking. For some reason, I've always had a little bit of a fear of speed, especially when first trying out something (skiing, driving a car, as here, biking, etc.) so my paranoid self was worried about falling off the bike and breaking some bone as I haven't biked for a few years, but after a few minutes, I was used to the feel of being on a bike again and began to feel the exhilarating adrenaline rushing through my veins.
Looks like Manhattan :D!

When you're living in a city, it's really easy to forget nature--a solace that the tiny patches in cities known as parks allow. It was also nice how much Yeouido Park reminded me of Battery Park, a small riverside park (just like Yeouido next to Hangang) near my home. It was also the first time I'd biked with a fairly large group (there were at least 10 of us I believe), and as the inverse law of movement goes, we moved quite slowly due to being a large group. Very often, Henry, Kevin (who was on rollerblades), and I found ourselves ahead, due to, well, our friends lagging behind to take pictures! I thought I took lot of pictures (as can be seen by my blog), but our friends took the cake! I guess the stereotype about Asians loving to use cameras everywhere they go is quite true hehe. We even ended up losing them at one point because we had biked far ahead while they had stopped to take multiple fun group pictures.
These were fountains near the bike rental place that we went to. As we started to take pictures, some of the fountains just began to shoot up with no warning, soaking us all! T_T

And for something that's (almost) off topic, I am so addicted to Soondubu 순두부 (a spicy casserole with silken tofu) as I think I order it anywhere between 1 and 3 times a week @_@! Why it's remotely related is that we went to a restaurant after biking, which had soondubu that sadly disappointed me :(. I think my favorites will always be the ones at Dolkkemaeul Tofu House, the small restaurant across from school, and the Rotary restaurant near Sinchon Station :).
Another notable event from the weekend, other than studying fiercely for midterms, was seeing Hyunseok, my mom's friend's sister's son (phew, what a mouthful), for his birthday! The people in the picture are his family :D.
Yummy Italian food~
Cake at the end.
On the left is Hyunseok and in the middle is Heesoo, my mom's friend's son who's come to Korea to study in Korea University (and is Hyunseok's cousin).

Lastly, I've started my Korean linguistics classes with my teacher, which has been fun, as part of it is review of some of my linguistics classes but in Korean. It blows my mind how much you can apply these same principles to different languages (except that they may be backwards or turned around or whatnot, such as in Korean). And then just seeing all the Korean examples and how everything relates to each other--phew! Crazy :) (linguistics geek end).