School starts....

So studying really officially started today. So yesterday I was a bit disappointed that the teacher suggested that I go to the lower class.... however, the final placement list that they gave us this morning shows that she placed me in the higher class. I really don't know why...... I told them what happened and they said that I should try out the higher class to see if I can follow along to decide whether I should switch back. So far so good... but it's pretty much at the extent of my Korean language now...

Class is QUITE intense. We can ONLY speak in Korean and the teacher only speak in Korean. The vocab the teacher uses is not too hard and she speaks slowly enough that I can follow along (thank God for a lot of self-studying beforehand or else I would definitely not have been able to follow along!). We had to practice speaking to each other by making up our own sample sentences..... it was quite intense.

The hardest part was the reading and listening class. The teacher told us a short story of a character and then gave us a letter that the character wrote, and we had to read it ourselves and answer some questions according to the content. Oh my.... seriously. There were a lot of words I couldn't understand, but we were able to kind of figure them out by asking each other in our table... in Korean. Oh my..... I really do feel that my Korean has gotten better quite exponentially the last few days.

For homework, we had to do Korean workbook with a lot of grammar practice. Again, lots of words to memorize..... hopefully tomorrow's class doesn't get A LOT harder than it has been today -_-.

Now onto the latter part of the day....

So my roommate, another classmate, and I decided to explore Seoul a bit. We first went to an ice cream store around the place we live.... good, but not great. Here is a picture of it..

Raspberry and green tea ice cream with some frozen raspberry, waffle cookie, cheesecake, and some berry syrup. Not bad... but really not too impressive.

Next, we went to this really traditional tea house that was quite far away (an hour by subway and bus. Distance-wise, it's probably pretty close). It was SOOOOO cool!!!! I think a poet bought the place and was kind of a quiet study area for people who just want to chat and have some tea.

It's a really really cool place with a Japanese teahouse-esque style teahouse.

(We were not lucky enough to get this seat because some other people were already using it... but it's kind of the idea).

Their menu was really awesome!

We really couldn't decide what to order... but we ended up getting what the waiter recommended. I got the Jujube tea, my roommate got pumpkin ice cream, and our classmate got five something something tea...

They also gave us some rice crispy thing for dessert. It's almost the same kind of stuff we have in the Chinese market, but much fresher so it's soft.

Here's my jujube tea..... cold. I really like it. Very refreshing.

And here is the rice crispy thing.

It was a really nice atmosphere there.... I felt like I could just take a nap there.

We then tried to go to Gyeongbokgung Palace, but by the time we got there, it was near closing time. So we quickly took some pictures and said we'll come back this weekend. They have a lot of palaces there and a bunch of people renting Hanbok and dressing up. It's really really cool to see Joseon era palaces still in its old grandeur!

There were two photographers taking picture of us (which is the reason we even got a picture of us three together). They said they're doing some advertisement thing of this palace and want to take pictures of us because we're foreigners and they feel like our picture would be good advertisement -_-. It was really weird to have people just taking pictures of you with their SLR without really telling why they were doing it.

Last thought of the day: I'm not really sure if Korea is a very tourist friendly place. Without speaking in Korean, it's sometimes hard to get around. You could try to speak in English or prepare ahead and all that, but some people just don't speak English. Also, people here aren't very friendly. They sometimes knock you out of the way to get somewhere (I don't think they mean to do it, but they don't apologize if they do). They appear really unfriendly, but I think it's just the way it is. If people can get past that part and just accept their culture as is, and kind of move along the same speed they do, they should be fine here.

And I'm speaking so much more Korean than I did even the day before! Once I'm pushed past my limit, I realized that I actually know a lot more words and can make up my own sentences more than I thought. I just needed something to push me to do it.

One more thought. My roommate really likes Kpop and K-drama. It was really weird to watch K-drama, on Korean TV, REAL TIME (like.... not 6 hours later than it's aired), with NO SUBTITLES. And we just pretty much talked about Kpop and K-drama while we were watching it on TV. It was quite fun. It was like I was back in college years in the dorms again. What added to that "dorm" experience was having to borrow books from classmates and GOING to their room (and having them come over) to lend me the book so I can do my homework before tomorrow morning. That was totally a college experience over again. I'm really glad that none of them feel that I'm too old and I'm just getting along really well. Haha.