Midterm and Halloween

 

Hello Everyone,

 

Trying to be a little more consistent with my posts, so here is a decent update after two weeks. The week of the 15-19th was pretty uneventful. Spent most of it studying for midterms. School is a lot different here mostly because the midterm and finals are so heavily weighted in the grade. Some classes that is the only grading criteria! The library was insane during this time. Our library was recently built and is probably my favorite building on campus. I wish I could take pictures but no cameras are allowed. You check into a spot using the touchscreen sign in computers located around the library. There are 8 floors, with about half of them just for study areas. The 8th floor is a cafe and has one of the coolest views of Sinchon that I have seen so far at Yonsei. The main area I was studying was on the 4th floor and had 6 sections with a little under 2,000 seats. One evening I went to the library to check into a spot and there were only EIGHT spots left. Eight. And it is so quiet that when you turn on your computer and it makes the little start up sound everyone stares at you. This was probably the first time that I really noticed how different I am haha. I walk into the room and everybody looks up and sees you and you get the stare that says "woah a white person!". It is a very eerie feeling but something you just have to live with being a foreigner. I studied very diligently, mostly for Korean which I ended up getting a 91% overall! yay. The weekend of the 20-21 was then pretty uneventful. We went to Anam to visit some of our friends and check out their place. They live off campus and in apartment, which is being nice calling it that. It basically is a room with a bed and a desk and a dresser. But they get to live on their own, and they have a rooftop they can hang out on that has a very cool view of the city. It is not as "lively" as the Sinchon area that I live in so it was interesting to see a more city like area of Seoul. Midterm week proved to not be as stressful as I was expecting. The Korean exam went well and I did well on it. We will see my other midterm results, but I am confident I did just fine. This past weekend we celebrated with the casino on Friday (lost too much money) and then ended the night with some nice Cuban cigars. You can get a Montecristo for around 20 bucks, which is extremely cheap. Saturday we went to the Halloween party which was a lot of fun. I went as a "white gangster" or "ghetto suburbs white kid" or "white trash" didn’t really know how to define it. It was a pretty awesome getup with an USA michael jordan jersey, these super ghetto jeans, a mohawk, and kanye west sunglasses.

I got a lot of stares for it but it was pretty funny all the same. Halloween is relatively new to Korea so not as many people were dressed up. Hopefully this Wed (real Halloween) there will be more people dressed up. Well I took my last midterm an hour ago (Asian philosophy) and hopefully did well. Been keeping busy trying to figure out my trips for the winter semester and what not. Right now I am tentatively planning on Japan two weeks, Indonesia a week, Thailand a week, and then Vietnam for at least one, maybe two weeks. But in the meantime the next couple weeks I will be doing some mountain climbing and apple picking, and hopefully a temple stay! Oh and working on buying some gifts for you guys. Well that’s it for now, hope all is well. Tell next time,

Samwise