Today's gonna be quite a short post because.... I didn't do much today. Haha. And I forgot to bring my phone to cafeteria for breakfast so no breakfast photo. However, it was pretty good. Although they decided to go back to miso based soups. Boo....

Class was quite challenging for me today because we started learning the formal politeness level and I was really struggling with all the "ssimida" and "ssimiga". Sigh. Hopefully one day I can speak that fluently.

My current struggle is to just make sure I can get all my particles down correctly. Blah!

Today is America's Independence Day and we kind of said "Happy Independence Day" to each other in class.... it was kind of weird that no one was keen on celebrating it anyways.

The girls in class are going to the Seventeen concert next week and they were all excited about it. I think that's where I always feel the age gap. I really don't know enough Kpop to really strike a conversation with them..... and I just don't really feel that I would ever watch enough Kpop videos to be able to converse with them. They're at the level where if they song came out YESTERDAY, they already know it. But for serious, I don't even know what American song came out yesterday, to know what Kpop song came out yesterday. Blah.

We ate at the school cafeteria for lunch today because it's much cheaper. It cost about 3,700 won for my lunch today. Not bad.

The soup kind of tasted like ramen.... maybe that's really what it is. And I've realized that the kimchee here is not only spicier, it's also more sour. Oh my...... I wince every time I eat it. :( I probably need to skip them from now on.

For culture class, we learned to dance Talchum, which is a traditional Korean mask dance. We didn't dance with masks today, but we did dance with this ssam today (I think that's what it's called). OH MY, it was quite a workout. Granted I haven't danced since I came here, but still..... it was really crazy.

So we practiced in the auditorium and the teacher was really energetic and dances really well. We practiced the moves for about 30 minutes or so. Here is a video of us dancing recorded by our teacher. Can you find me somewhere in there?

And yes, we were all over the place.... but I think I did a good job following all the directions correctly. I just don't have the flare the teacher does..

And then she got us to dance row by row, which I don't have a video of me dancing, but here is a video of my other classmates.

I think they did a good job. The teacher wanted us to roll over from the head at the end.... and I was like, I haven't done that since I was 5?! So no, probably don't wanna hurt myself on hard floor -_-.

Here are some group pictures:

Can you tell which one is the teacher? She's quite young :)

Oh by the way, the girls here are always talking about boys. OMG. When we went to the war museum, we had the soldiers tour the museum on the same day and the young ones (like 19 year olds) were trying to walk next to them the whole time and acting super shy about it. My goodness. I think the oldness in me has really rubbed off this kind of shyness, or feeling the need to be like that as I probably would have been if I were in college. The girls also asked me if I've spotted any cute guys while I am in Korea... and I was like..... umm.... I don't usually walk and check people out -_-. I probably would if I were MUCH younger. Bleh. So far, I'm just enjoying touring by myself everywhere. 

So later today, I went to the school library to study. It was quite nice there, but I also was getting super sleepy trying to study........ but I don't know how the culture is here about taking a nap in the library (we used to do it at lot in UCLA! I would even lay flat on the couch! Hey, you gotta do what you gotta do in order to be alert for your next class), so I was just dozing off on my arm.

Studying in library saved me 5,500 won from studying in a cafe. Ha.

But I still got a bubble tea (yeah, that's what they call boba here) at the school cafe just to see how Koreans make boba. Not bad. The milk tea was pretty good.

Just thought it was weird that they added boba last, which is the reason that they're floating on the top. 

And then I also got a Sogang University notebook so I can start practicing writing Korean daily.

Oh yeah, I've been wanting to show you guys how the dorm looks like. Here's a video I found on YouTube that is pretty much exactly how it looks like now.

Last thought of the day: 

So our language teacher stopped class for about 5 minutes or so to tell us why the school doesn't want us to take notes while learning, which is their philosophy in teaching language. They feel that we can innately learn languages like we did as kids, by mimicking sounds and etc without being reliant on the spelling and etc. So they want us to try speaking as much as possible and listening as much as possible to learn the "sound" of normal Korean sentences and words, but only use the books and structure as additional tools later. 

I know where she's coming from, but the problem is, I cannot remember words if I don't have an "image" of something in my mind. Just telling me that this word is "____" and force me to memorize the sound is sooooo hard, without something visual I can tag the sound to, or refer back to later if I forget. Telling me that basketball is "nong go", but not giving me those letters or anything that can remind me of why the words sound the way they do, while giving me 20+ words and phrases I'm supposed to remember that day.... is a lot of information overload. I think she feels that if we cannot learn that way, then we learn kind of slow and should preview the lesson the previous day. Sigh. I've never thought of myself as a slow learner until now. I've always felt that I learn really fast..... but apparently I'm still not fast enough. 

My Singaporean friends and I were talking about how we asians are the only ones in class who's spending hours previewing the lesson the night before so we can be super prepared for class. I'm not even sure if any of our classmates really need to... since they learn much faster than I do. Bleh. 

Alright, time to do some review and get ready for tomorrow!