"결혼하자" "하지, 뭐"

"Let's get married." "Sure, why not?"

That's how our teacher described how her now husband proposed to her when we asked whether he got down on his knees and proposed in a romantic fashion haha. Not sure whether to believe her, considering she also told us she had many many boyfriends at the beginning of the year haha.

But before I get to the wedding, I'll recap a trip Henry, Kana, Xue Qing, and I took the day before it to Incheon. One great thing about vacations is taking advantage to go to farther places you probably wouldn't go otherwise. The place we chose was Incheon--on the northwestern coast of Korea and where the international airport is. Also where there is a Chinatown with authentic Chinese food, woo! (The main reason why we went there) We almost ended up not going because Henry's friend cancelled on us but in the end I convinced everyone to go anyway! When else would we have the chance to go again??? One thing about groups is that you just need someone to say "Let's do this!" and everyone will. I've definitely experienced a lot of that here. Not to mention after you go you really think "I'm so glad I came here!" Definitely what I felt about the Incheon trip.
Henry takes a picture of Xue Qing, Kana, and me in front of Chinatown.
Kana walks in the sunlight of Chinatown.
Delicious delicious food. Three plates of jajangmyeon 자장면 which is 炸醬麵 and one of jajang rice (because Henry is allergic to flour). One of sweet/sour/spicy shrimp, mapo tofu 麻婆豆腐, and spicy chicken. Mm mm!
And after stuffing ourselves we decided to do some sightseeing nearby.
Interesting structure.
Pretty!
Ahh how I love scenery!
So cold!!!
We're a fun bunch.
Because there was an exercise park nearby. By the way, in this exercise park there was this crazy (and by crazy I mean crazy strong) ajusshi doing all kinds of exercises and watching us amusedly.
And the pretty lights come on as it gets dark!
In front of the changing lights, with Kana looking like a ghost haha.
Trippy!
Pretty night scenery.
Superheroes!
Chinatown lit up at night!
Dumplings and jajangmyeon, the symbol of Chinatown?
After visiting the Incheon Chinatown, we then went to meet up with my old friends from Level 3 last year, Chikae and Min Jie! As well as Jonathan (who isn't in this picture though)!

Now as for the wedding, it was my first experience going to a Korean wedding! In fact, it's my first experience going to a wedding I can actually remember, since the only one I've been to in the US was my mom's friend's daughter's wedding, and I was really young then. Exciting stuff ^^, and VERY rushed! We met up at Seoul station at 9:50AM to catch the 10:20 train to Daegu 대구, in the center of Korea and its third largest city, as well as our teacher's hometown. After arriving, we took a taxi to Nine Well, a restaurant where we ate a pre-wedding lunch that was really delicious and consisted of a lot of small dishes that stuffed us...not to mention when the last dish came out we were told we only had 5 minutes left to eat before we had to leave for the wedding, ay! The service was at a place called "New York New York" (yay New York pride :D) and basically about 5 minutes after we got there the service already began! Our teacher looked beautiful as expected so of course our whole class went crazy with picture taking, especially during the kiss! Our class had prepared a song (half Chinese and half Japanese) to sing for our teacher together. Our classmate Yukiko had also prepared a slideshow to go along with it which was really touching! Unfortunately since they didn't have a projector or any screen there, we couldn't show it along with our singing, which would have been really nice! Ah well, our teacher will see it anyway :). While performing the song, we must have looked like preschoolers...maybe kindergarteners? Hahaha, with our swaying arms, and our clapping arms while moving from side to side, etc. Ahh, I'm gonna miss our class ^^. After that, we took pictures with her and then took pictures with her in a hanbok outfit with her newlywed husband. And because we had to catch a train at 3:55, we didn't eat at the reception. But at that point, it was already 3:45, so after a rushed attempt to get a taxi and the taxi driver speeding through Daegu to get us to the station on time, we got to Dong Daegu Station 동대구역 with two and a half minutes to dash to the train in our dress shoes and suits. And by 6PM we were back in Seoul. Felt like it all went by in a blur! Oh yeah, I've also realized how small Korea is from the fact that by train it took less than 2 hours to get to Daegu...about the same as a trip between New Haven and New York! Whew.

After a quick dinner, Xue Qing and I met up with Henry to just wander around the Cheonggyecheon 청계천 area (a beautiful manmade stream in the middle of Seoul that's fun to walk around and often has events). If you followed this blog from when I was here last summer, you'll see some pictures from it ^^. One thing I've really come to love to do with my free time is to just walk around a city and really explore it--connect the dots in the mental map in my mind. Not to mention, it's free! An interesting experience I often have is how my mental map of an area is skewed as I visit it at different times. It's a hard feeling to explain...but for example when I first went to visit Yale on a tour, it felt like a completely different area from when I actually began to attend it, and then it felt slightly different again as I went up to sophomore year and my center point became not Old Campus, but Morse. In a weird kind of way, my "north," or mental compass (?) re-orients itself. It's a hard feeling to explain...I'm sure I'll have a similar experience when I go back again. But for Seoul, because last year my center point was Sogang University (as I lived across from it, so I was very near Daeheung Station), it was very different from this year, where my center point is now Hyundai Department Store (very near my place, which is near Sinchon Station), so I've become very familiar with the "maze" near Sinchon Station (an area where there are a lot of restaurants and bars and which is flooded with people on the weekends) and the area near Daeheung Station has become more foreign to me. Last year, I once went with Andrew McTernan (a former Light Fellow) to Hongdae, an area that's only about 10-15 minutes from where I live now, and somehow we took about 40 minutes to an hour to get there. I didn't understand how we took so long but yesterday, as Henry, Xue Qing, and I went to a Kimbap Cheonguk 김밥천국 (a chain of kimbap stores that is like McDonald's of Korea, but probably more healthy, by a lot) near the Sinchon Rotary, it finally clicked in my head and the mental map was connected--duh, we had walked in a perpendicular direction to Hongdae, which is why it took so long, and why the road to Hongdae seemed to unfamiliar when I walked it this time!

Okay, that was a completely useless ramble, haha, so here are pictures from the wedding!
As we descend the stairs to take KTX. Xue Qing was excited to be taking the KTX for the first time so she said "take a picture!" (in Korean of course).
Half our class sitting at the other table.
An example of the yummy yummy food.
Kana, Yukiko, and Xue Qing with our teacher just before the service began!
구은미 선생님 walks with her father.
Bride and groom at the altar.
Parents of the groom.
Parents of the bride.
We prepare for our song.
Relatives maybe? Singing another song.
Bride and groom's families take a bow.
For some reason, the announcer had bride and groom do silly actions haha, I'm not sure why...
Then the groom picks up the bride and says "오늘밤 우리 사랑하자!" "Tonight, let's love!" Hahaha, I wasn't aware weddings were supposed to be funny like this ;P.
Just before the kiss...
And just after it!
Bride and groom walk down the aisle and friends and family shoot streamers!
Family picture.
구은미 선생님 tosses the bouquet~
Our class and our teacher's other students (including the ones she taught in Osaka) take a picture with our teacher!
In the traditional hanbok costumes.
^_^!
Back at Seoul Station...strange human figures walking around on the billboard...
Xue Qing and Henry with some cute figures in the City Hall subway station.
There was an art exhibit of lanterns (this part shows landmarks from all over the world) at Cheonggyecheon, but what's this guy doing here???
Pretty lanterns...and Halloween jack-o-lanterns, what???
Lanterns in the shape of the zodiac figures--the snake (Henry and me) and the horse (Xue Qing).
Umbrellas in the nice arrangement.
Yummy 떡 rice cakes given to us from our teacher's wedding.
깡페! Hoodlums!

One more week of vacation, then on to Level 5!

주말 대만 여행 周末臺灣旅行

Weekend trip to Taiwan!

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!