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

Hello All!

Sorry about the long time between posts. It's hard to find time and I also wanted to wait tell I could upload my pictures as well. Life here has been pretty good. I am about to start studying for midterms, which are in a week! Ill start off with explaining my living situation. We live in a new style dorm. I have a rommate from Australia and it has gone very smoothly so far! Our room is a little bigger then the typical American dorm and we get our own porch. We also have our own bathroom and shower in our room. The best part is we get air conditioning and heated floors! Our dorm is connected underground to our main study abroad building so all my classes are very close. We also have some great resturaunts and coffee shops close by (including the best sandwich place I have ever been to!) I will give a kind of run down about my typical week. I have class 5 days a week, but on Fridays I don’t start tell 4! The other classes I start at around 11 or 12, except Thursdays I start at 9 for Taekwondo! Taekwondo has been a very cool class and a good workout at the same time. I am thinking that next semester I am going to join the international taekwondo club and improve even more. My other classes are all relatively easy. I have a class titled "Comparing East Asian Cinemas" and we typically watch movies from different Asian countries and discuss how they express the culture and relate to other Asian movies. I am also taking "East Asian Philosophies" which is pretty self-explanatory, and Pre-Modern Korean history which unfortunately is my most boring class by far, but oh well I guess. My most difficult class is easily Korean Language. I was preparing for that so it’s not such a surprise. It is every day for two hours but it goes by fast since I am paying attention the entire time. Learning another language has easily been the most difficult thing of my educational career, but I am working on it each day so hopefully it gets better. Other than class during the week I work out and actually have been playing a lot of soccer. That’s always a fun time and its usually small games like 7-7 but it can get pretty competitive. It is also an easy way to remind me how out of shape I am haha. On Tuesday nights I usually try to attend Emmaus, which is a Christian Youth group on campus. It is very interesting and something I have never done before, but I have enjoyed it so far. Since I don’t have class tell 4 on Friday we usually go out Thursday nights. A popular area of Seoul that we go to is Hongdae, which is a quick subway ride from Sinchon (where I live). Every weekend has been a different adventure, and I will kinda break down what I have done each weekend.

Sept 8-9: That weekend we stayed around Seoul and partied. I think Saturday night we went to Mansion, which is a great place. One of my friends sister works at Mansion so we can get in for free. The Koreans seem to love when foreigners come to their clubs so I usually work my way up to the front and dance on stage haha. The nightlife is definitely different then back home. First off it’s legal to drink and you can drink anywhere (including the streets). Second they party for the entire night. We usually don’t get back tell around 4-5 in the morning. I've only been to a handful of clubs back home but the clubs here are really different. Some of them are very spacious and you can dance your heart out, otherwise some are super packed and it feels like you are at a house party. It is a ton of fun though and we try to go out at least once during the week.

Sept 15-16: This was a very fun weekend because it was the weekend of the "Yonko" games. The yonko games are a competition between Yonsei University (mine) vs Korea University in 5 different sports. They are baseball, ice hockey, basketball, soccer, and rugby. We watched the baseball game (okay), the rugby game (okay) and the soccer game (not very good at all). I was pretty disappointed with the level of play, but the Yonko games are not about the actual games but the cheering and school pride. We were literally standing and cheering the entire game. They have their own cheering squad that leads different types of cheers. We even had 3 different cheering "practices" before the games so we could learn the chants and such. It was a very different experience from back home. I thought college sports had school spirit, but it was nothing compared to the Yonko games. Afterwards on Saturday the alumni hosted a party at Yonsei. They had free food, free beer, and a live concert.

 

This was also very fun. Oh we also watched an Australian rules football game "footie". One of my buddies is a very big supporter of one of the teams playing (Collingwood) and got us all to go and watch it with them. Footie is actually a very fun game and much more exciting to watch on tv then American football.

Sept  22-23: This weekend we went outside of the city to a small village called Namhae in the Southeastern corner of Korea. This was a ton of fun and nice to finally get out of the city. The group consisted of about 40 people around the ages of 20-30 so that was nice, but the majority of them were English teachers. I really enjoyed talking to them and hearing their experience so I can prepare myself and figure out where I want to teach English after undergrad and before I head off to grad school. We stayed in traditional Korean houses and slept on the floor (more comfortable then you would think). On Saturday we went Coastering (kinda like cliff diving) and snorkeling. That night we had a traditional Korean seafood dinner and a bonfire on the beach. The next day we went sea kayaking which was a ton of fun and a great workout. We ended up getting back to Seoul around 10 that Sunday night. It was a great trip and very nice to finally see the Korean countryside and go to the ocean.

our house!

 

Sept 29-30: This weekend was not too special, as most people were gone for the Chuseok Holiday (Korean Thanksgiving). I know we went to the casino which was a lot of fun. We also smoked Cuban cigars there and basically felt like bosses haha. Another night we were in Hongdae and ended up accidently going to a singles party. This was very entertaining because one of the guys there kept inviting me up on stage. I was dancing up there and having a great time while all my friends were dancing and laughing down below. I didn’t realize tell after that they were laughing AT me because the guys that invited me up there were gay and dancing behind me haha. So here I am the dumb American dancing up front while I have these gay Koreans dancing behind me and having no idea that they were trying to hit on me haha. My roommate has some great pictures of me dancing like an idiot while these Korean men are dancing behind me.

The following week we had three days off of school for holiday. One of the days I got a full body message, which felt amazing. Another day we went to a Chuesok festival where we got to experience old Korean culture and sightsee some more. We also went to the free Psy concert (Singer of "gangnam style")which was amazing. On Saturday we went to see the fireworks which were really cool. They had four different countries do their own separate shows, so the firework show lasted about 2 hours. The best part of it though was going to the actual firework show. Everybody in Korea it seemed was trying to go so people were fighting to get on the subway and walk through the streets. We were walking through the streets to the fireworks and it felt like we were walking through a house party since there were so many people.

 

Oct 13-14: This past weekend we went on a trip through the international program at our school. It was only 20,000 won (about 18 us dollars) and boy was it only worth that much haha. It was very disorganized and we ended up being on the bus much longer than we thought, but it was still fun seeing a different part of Korea and getting free food.

Studying abroad has been an amazing experience already and I still have 8 months left. I miss everyone back home but being here is a truly once in a lifetime experience. The coolest part about the trip is living in a different culture and meeting people from all over the world. It is fun sharing cultures and seeing what is important to other people from different nationalities. Just today I had to explain to my roommate what "homecoming" is haha. (after trying to explain it I realized how weird it probably sounds to people who have never heard of homecoming). Like last Saturday we were talking politics and it was so interesting to hear other people’s perspectives from different areas of the world. That would be the main reason why you should study abroad, to meet different people and live in a different world. The culture shock has not been too overwhelming. I am living in the second most populated city in the world, so it is very capitalistic. There are the usual fastfood areas and popular fashion sights. The biggest culture shock has been learning other cultures and also going outside to rural Korea. I am excited to get back home and share my experience with other friends of mine that are also currently studying abroad.

I think that is it for now. I will try to be more consistent with my blog posts so the week’s events are fresher in my head. If you have any questions about anything please comment on the blog or message me and we can have a conversation! Next week is midterms so I’ll be spending the week/weekend studying unfortunately :/ but after that is Halloween and we are going to a Halloween party in gangnam which should be pretty fun!

 

 

Well that’s all for now, hope to hear from you guys soon!

Love,
Samuel Michael Luby

My First Post

Hello Friends,

Finally I seem to have the time to create my first blog post. I can't believe I have only been here a week, it seems like I have been here for at least a month. I started off with the most uncomfortable plan ride inbetween two men that lasted for 14 hours. Finally I got off and sought to be picked up by the Yonsei services. It took almost an hour to drive to the University, but in that time I got to talk to a Korean student and see some of the landscape. Mountains, rivers, and of course millions of people. I have never lived in a city before so this all seems so new to me. Everyday you see so many people and walk along streets that you swear you have never seen before. There is so many shops and resturants and they all seem to be open 24 hours a day. The first night one of my new friends bought a tshirt in a department store at 11 at night! The following next couple days consisted of orenitation and getting situated into my new home. We went to Itaewon, which is a very touristy area, and got the mundane shopping needed to live in the dorms. The dorms, by the way, have air conditioning! and overall much nicer then the ones back at Gustavus. Each room even gets their own personal shower and toilet room. We spent our first Saturday night in Itaewon and went to a very traditional Korean resturaunt. We had to take our shoes off and sit cross legged as well.

This picture is a very broad picture of what the seating looked like. That night was the first night that one of us felt the wrath of Soju! It is basically vodka mixed with water and lemon, but it is cheaper then water. The weird thing is that Koreans drink it every time they dine out for lunch of dinner. It is almost disrespectful to not have a bottle of soju during the meal. My roommate was the victim of soju this night, and many good stories were born from this experience. Since then I have made more friendships and gone to a couple of other different places. The nightlife here is unbelieveable, and all the prices relatively cheap. There is always clubs you can go to and bars that serve beer for less then 2,000 won (less then 2 US dollars). School doesnt start tell the 3rd so we have been taking advantage of the free days by going out at nights. The campus itself is very large, but extremely beautiful. Come fall time and I will be taking many pictures to post for you guys to see. This blog will be mostly for updating on my daily travels and what not, but if you want to see my pictures go to my facebook page. Please, do not judge my writing skills. I will not be reviewing each blog nor correcting the puncation nor the spelling. I'm sure some of you will have fun doing that on your own :). Well thats it for now, I'm not too sure how often I will be doing this but if something significant happens or if im bored ill make sure to update it. Remember, my skype name is samwise.luby and you can IM me on that so we could text that way if you would like. Literally everywhere in Korea has wifi so its super easy.

Until next time!

 

Sam