자신감이 생길거야*

* = I will gain self-confidence (jashingam-ee saenggil-geoh-ya)

I have officially been in Seoul for over a week now, and adjusting to life as Jangmi (장미, my Korean name, which means "rose") has been nothing if not terribly interesting. I'm inclined to say that I really like Seoul 생활 (daily life), which is to say that the many frustrations that are implicit in living in a far stranger setting than what you're used to are usually minimized by the amazing payoffs that immersing yourself in a new culture undoubtedly brings.

Goshitel life is just fine, although everyone here is unfriendly to the point where I may or may not have seen a girl or two snarl when I talk to Sneha or Becky (who are both living here) in the hall. Nobody's really spoken to me, although the girl who lives next door to me did give me a small smile and bow when we ran into each other in the kitchen. I want to be like, "HEY let's practice Korean and be 친구 (chingu, friend)!" but of course I don't say that because that would make me look even more like the absurd American I'm sure 80% of these people think I am. The only people who seem to be vaguely amused by me are high school kids, many of whom giggle and stare as I pass. Some of them even work up the courage to say, "Hi!" to which I usually respond in kind, sending them into convulsions of giggles yet again. The other day, the girl to whom I spoke looked so thrilled at talking to an American that I even went a step further and asked, "How are you?" She replied in a high voice, "FINE THANKS AND YOU!" It was hilarious. She and the boy she was with then proceded to follow us for a good 30 feet. I don't really know what they wanted, but the whole exchange was rather amusing.

I finally did buy bed supplies, but honestly, it was one of those WTF foreigner experiences. Evidently, Koreans do not use sheets. Bedding seems to consist of an outrageously expensive mattress cover (mine cost about $40) and a blanket, which was only $10 in comparsion. This is incredibly odd to me, whose entire set of bed sheets for school (this includes a matress cover, sheet, and pillowcase) was about $15 total, plus a more expensive comforter and perhaps another sheet to go in between. But here, my bed consists of the blanket I bought (usually haphazardly draped over the bed) the mattress cover, and a $5 pillow currently encased in an old Yale t-shirt because I neglected to purchase a pillowcase. Okay.

Because there's no food in the goshitel (with the exception of round-the-clock rice and kimchi, which, no thanks), we go out to eat every night for dinner. We've found some keepers in this process, as well as some disasters - one restaurant kept Hisashi waiting for over 30 minutes for his food, due to the incompetence of a waitress who refused to speak to us, preferring to use hand gestures to indicate yeses and nos, despite the fact that we spoke to her in intelligible Korean. Other than that, we found a place with spectacular dumplings, made by an ajoshi sitting by the window, a vegetarian haven, and a cute restaurant where you sit on the floor with delicious banchan and 뚝배 불고기, a savoury beef soup with onions and noodles. We went there tonight, and it was astoundingly good. Cheap, too - only 5 dollars for a very good meal. Prices are extremely decent here, and the exchange rate is currently in our favor. Let's hope it lasts. We've yet to eat the famous and wonderfully delicious Korean BBQ (Sneha and Bob are vegetarians, so we do what we can to avoid places that only serve BBQ), but I am dying to go and hopefully will go this week.

We've also been eating a lot of dessert, mostly patbingsu, or a frozen dessert made with shaved ice, condensed milk, frozen yogurt, fruit, red bean (pat), and ddeok (the Korean version of Japanese mochi, sweet rice cakes). This treat is meant to be mixed and shared, and we've eaten it 4 or 5 times already. Good ice cream is also readily available at Baskin Robbins, which are EVERYWHERE and seem to have a monopoly on the ice cream market - they are fancier and (in my opinion) much better here than they are in the States. We had chocolate fondue and ice cream the other night and it was great. In addition to ice cream or ice cream-based desserts, I'm dying to try Korean waffles, which everyone here seems to be crazy about. You've only to walk down the street to see a bunch of college and high school kids carrying hot waffles, folded over a creamy and delicious-looking filling. One girl was eating one in front of me on the subway today and I stared at her jealously for almost the entire ride. I wanted to buy one as soon as we arrived back in Sinchon, but alas, it was too close to dinnertime. I still haven't had one. WHY.

After a full week of classes, I am still not totally sure that I should be in level 3, although my listening and understanding have definitely improved. Speaking, not so much (I made a complete ass of myself at the post office trying to send a package home to a friend - quite the ego-smasher, that was, and terribly indicative of how far I have to go in this language), but it is still very, very early in the program. I can't expect to be chatting up the locals after 20 hours of Korean class, only 8 of which were actually devoted to 말하기 (malhagi, or speaking). Unfortunately, it is really hard to practice among the Light Fellows because most of us are at the same low level and communication on any scale beyond simple sentences (most of which are extraordinarily context-dependent), is near impossible. I am hoping to get a language partner in the next week or so, one who can speak to me in Korean and force me to use my language skills, however limited, to get a point across.

So class begins at 9:00AM, which is earlier than any class I ever took at Yale, and lasts for about 4 hours (thankfully peppered with breaks every 50 minutes). My schedule looks something like this:
9:00 -- 쓰기 (writing) with Choi Sunsaengnim, a delightful young woman who is incredibly patient and consistently encouraging of my decidedly stunted abilities. She calmly corrects my many spelling errors and always tells me that I did well, regardless of how stupid my mistakes have been. I have to admit that I took an immediate liking to her because she reminds me very much of my old sort-of tutor, Jaehee Ju - if any readers out there know Jaehee, you'll know that anyone who is remotely like her must be a pretty spectacular individual.
10:00 -- 말하기 (speaking) with Lee Sunsaengnim, who is sadly not Angela Sunsaengnim, despite the fact that they have the same last name. We have speaking class for two hours; Sogang is intensely focused on speaking ability. While I certainly appreciate this, I actually feel as though my speaking abilities are the only ones getting worse, or at least not improving. I think the reason for this is the fact that I am so far behind everyone else; my speaking is still at level 2, which implies that there are 9 or so chapters of grammar that I haven't been using/don't know how to use. Hence the need to find a language partner and start brushing up. A girl in my class was nice enough to photocopy her copy of book 2B for me, so I've been studying that on my own and hopefully can practice some of this stuff in the coming days. In any case, Lee Sunsaegnim is generally nice, pregnant, and looks an awful lot like Hayeon's mom to me. That says almost nothing about her, but that would be my only impression at this point. She does have cute maternity clothes, though.
12:00 -- 듣기/읽기 (listening/reading) with Yang Sunsaengnim. This class makes me break out in hives, I swear. When Yang Sunsaengnim walks into the room, I can all of a sudden understand absolutely nothing. She speaks very quickly, and I get nervous just trying to follow. I think the issue with this class is (again) that I am missing 9 chapters of vocabulary. I started trying to catch up today, and it...well, it's going to take some time. 화이팅? Anyway, someone told me that Yang (양) is a pretty common last name out on Jeju-do, an island south of Korea, where they speak a heavily-accented version of the Seoul Korean I'm used to hearing; therefore, I have decided that this teacher must be from Jeju-do and therefore speaks incomprehensibly. Becky, another Light Fellow who I am extremely grateful to have met, informs me that this is absolutely not the case, but I swear - I can understand both Choi and Lee Sunsaengnim a thousand times better than this one! WHY. She's totally from Jeju-do.

Class ends at 1:00, and our little group of Lighters usually congregates outside of the KLEC building and heads off to a cheap but delicious lunch at a low-end chain restaurant called Kimbap Heaven. This place serves nearly everything you can think of, from its namesake food (kimbap = Korean sushi-ish rolls, full of vegetables & meat, flavored with sesame oil) to bibimbap and kimchi jjigae. I've taken a special liking to cheese ddeokbokki, which is essentially fat rice cakes covered in a spicy red sauce and a slice of what appears to be Kraft Singles cheese. You can add ramen noodes for <50 cents more. EVERYTHING IS SO CHEAP. Loves it.

Last Tuesday, I actually went to a ddeokbokki restaurant near E-Dae (Ewha Women's University) with Michelle Cho, a friend of Hayeon and Greta's that I met when all three were studying at Cambridge last summer. It was really great to see Michelle again, to catch up, and to eat more ddeokbokki than I could chew. After we scraped the plate clean, our waiter reheat the burner (a lot of food is served in big communal dishes that are heated over a burner in the center of the table and shared) and filled the pan with rice, vegetables, and gochujang to make a very tasty fried rice - for <$1.50 more! Such a good idea. On our way back to the rotary, Michelle pointed out good locales for future dining, which I'm sure will come in handy. This walk around E-Dae also allowed me my first experience with 장마 (jangma, the rainy season), in which the heavens open up and attempt to drown everyone for about an hour. This is then followed by sunshine and total calm, as though it had never happened at all. I had to buy an umbrella because I stupidly forgot one at home. I think that this rainy season is supposed to last basically the entire summer, so I'm sure I've got a lot more potential drowning to look forward to.

But enough about that.

In other news, last night I had the fabulous opportunity to see the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra perform free of charge. This was courtesy of my beloved fall semester TA, Jihye Chung, who left Yale in December to join the orchestra. After some email correspondence (none of us have phones yet), we boarded the 2 line subway bound for Seocho, yet another ritzy area home not only to one Hayeon Lee, but also to the Seoul Arts Center, where the Philharmonic plays. It was a pretty beautiful area, quite unlike Sinchon, and the concert hall was gorgeous. After a wonderful show, which included some crazy drummer guy named Colin Currie, who astounded the crowd with his percussion skills (prompting him to come out for no less than 8 encores and play another set), we saw Jihye, and that was probably one of the most wonderful things to happen since I've been in Seoul. Everyone knows how much I hate goodbyes, but I acknowledge their necessity if we are to have reunions as happy as the one Jihye had with our class last night. Once we met her, we all stood around grinning like idiots for a good 15 seconds before I awkwardly proffered the cheap-ass bouquet of gaudy-looking roses we bought for her from a flower vendor at the Sinchon rotary, then mob-hugged her. She hasn't changed a bit (not that she would have in 6 months), and it was so wonderful to see her. She and her boyfriend Wayne, who is concert-master of the orchestra(!) generously took us out to a soju bar in Apgujeong afterwards, where we caught up a little, drank, ate ddeokbokki, and played this ridiculous drinking game involving the names of various fruits and vegetables (I think it's called

딸기 게임, Strawberry Game, or something along those lines). I lost twice; no further comment is needed.

Jihye promised to meet us again on Monday night, and when their touring season calms down a bit in a few weeks, she said she'd be happy to meet with me and tutor me again. This is the best news I've heard in awhile, not only because I missed Jihye so much, but because my Korean is severely in want of a solid tutor. Hopefully she can help me catch up with all the stuff I've missed.

Today, we went to 명동, Myeongdong, an area famous for its shopping district. There are a lot of these in Seoul (Dongdaemun, Namdaemun, and Insadong, to name just a few), but Myeongdong has a lot of appeal for younger audiences. There are plenty of clothing shops, jewelry stores, food stands, makeup places, etc. I wound up buying 2 pairs of earrings for less than 2 dollars; after putting them in and discovering how ridiculously cute they were, I immediately regretted not buying more, but there are plenty of weekends left for me to go back to Myeongdong, and plenty more time to realize that these cheap earring are probably going to turn my earlobes green. Similarly, there is plenty of time left for me to go to a noraebang (I can't believe I haven't done this yet - these are essentially karaoke rooms, translated from 노래 = norae, or song and 방 = bang, or room), eat galbi and samgyeopsal until I burst, visit Hangang Park, get another ear piercing in Hongdae (what?), and a thousand other things that I have planned to do. A summer seems like forever, but it's already been a week in the blink of an eye. How quickly will the rest pass?

This is long enough, long enough to the point where I'd be surprised if anyone has made it to these actual words detailing a psuedo-apology for the length of this entry. I suppose this indicates that I should blog more frequently so I don't have to cram everything into one ridiculous post. In the meantime, I'll be returning to my studying and to listening to Korean pop, which I do often and much. My current favorite song is a rather terrible SNSD song called "Into the New World." It's quite catchy, and perfectly applicable in my opinion - this whole crazy trip is nothing if not a new world. Is it not?