Field Trip - Day 2

We got up this morning much later...... at 7am or so and got to breakfast area inside the resort.

These are the mascots for the winter Olympics!

They had really nice food selection for the resort!

And here's my plate.

After breakfast, we started for Jeongseon for the rail bike. This is the rice paddy on the way there.

So the place used to transport coals from one place to another using train, but since coals are not in use these days, they don't have any use for the rails, so they converted the rails into rail bikes.

We have four people to a car and we just start pedaling for about 40 minutes around the place. There are a few tunnels that are really decorated for the experience. It was SOOOOO FUN!!

I probably take the worst pictures.... but anyways, I try my best!

After the Jeongseon rail bike, we went to a place to learn the Jeongseon Arirang. So there are a lot of different arirang in Korea, for different regions. This is one of the oldest arirang... and this lady taught us how to sing it.

Here's a video of her singing the chorus part, which we mastered pretty quickly (no video evidence unfortunately).

Here is a video of her trying to teach us singing the second part, which she said was like rapping.... which I agree. We failed pretty miserably the first time around...

Here is the music sheet if you want to try it out..

We went outside of the place to look around and they have this bridge that crosses a river with two statues on either side. The legend goes that the boy was going to marry the girl before he sailed off to transport some timber, but got swept into a storm and never came back. The girl waited for him at the river for days, but realized he wasn't going to come back, so she jumped into the river. The statues are to commemorate them.

My classmate said I should try to take a picture with the man. Haha.

After that, we went to a restaurant that is a very traditional Korean place that you sit on the floor with lots of banchan. It was so much food that we just couldn't finish....

Our Korean TA came by and said in Chinese, "can I sit here?" we were like, "what?! You speak Chinese?!" And he said that he lived in China from 5 to 15 or so, so he can speak Chinese, but his Korean is the most fluent. And we got to talk to him a lot during lunch...... and then the director of KIP came over and talked to him to ask him if he spoke Chinese, and she can actually speak a little too! So I think in Korea, a lot of people can probably speak Chinese better than they can speak English. If you're a Chinese going to Korea, it's easier to ask if they speak Chinese than English, because most of them will tell you no.....

The school later took us to a 5 day market, which means they only open every 5 days. It's basically like traditional Taiwanese market... but the stuff was a bit expensive.

So the only thing I got was Sikhye because I've only had canned ones..... and this one was really tasty!

Mmmm... yum. I'm going to go to Namdaemun to shop a bit more... to see what else they have in these traditional markets.

Oh, and the school's so funny... they gave us each 10,000 won to spend in the market. Hahahaha... I've never seen anyone give us "red envelope" for spending money.

While waiting on the bus for other people to arrive, I managed to catch Farfech'd, which is the Asian Pokemon that you can only catch in Asia. Woohoo!

Now I can officially retire from Pokemon Go until I go to the next continent that has the special Pokemon.

Like I mentioned, Korean tour is quite funny that they keep giving us snacks to feed us on the long ride. They bought all of us a bag of walnut snacks for the trip (they said it's traditional to eat these pastries during the bus rides).

Then they gave us some more tteok.

It tasted kind of like 草仔糕 in Taiwan, but with red bean inside.

They also gave us Choco Pie to make sure we don't starve and a poncho since it started raining. Man.... they were quite considerate.

And that completes the two day trip! It was very fun :)

Last Thought: I am doubting if I will ever be fluent in Korean. My Korean learning has been so haphazard and I just doubt that I can really remember everything I learn in the next month. My communication skills is really bad... and every time I talk to a Korean, my confidence in communicating goes down because I'm more and more afraid to talk to them, thinking that my pronunciation is just so bad and I can't think on the fly that quickly using a new language.

I've also noticed that when I read Hangeul, I can't really search in my memory bank for the words it matches unless it sounds almost like Chinese. If it's just a specific Korean word I'm supposed to memorize, I basically will be reading the entire sentence without knowing what the word is.... until I read it at least 3 times. :( I really hope that I can regain my confidence in learning and just keep going until I can have a breakthrough!

Oh something made my day..... the tour guide saw me and told the other tour guide (and she was showing me too), she asked if I'm Korean-American. I told her I'm actually Chinese. She said I look like Lena Park... I was like..... seriously? But she's so pretty! I was pretty flattered. When she searched on Google for Lena Park's picture, I was thinking, "oh no, this is gonna be another person who looks more masculine", because my sis had compared me to Arashi before -_-. I'm glad it's Lena Park, because she's really pretty.... and she looks super young even though she's almost 40!

Here is Lena Park's picture: