Chusuk Holiday and food pictures 9/7/2014

This week is the Chuesuk (spelling) holiday in Korea, so Monday - Wednesday are all off school.  It's essentially the equivalent of Thanksgiving in America.  I'm not doing anything special though.  I think I will just try to travel around the city and find interesting things while I have the days off, and relax.

I had my first snowboarding class last Friday.  This was the only class I signed up for that was not taught in English, but Korean.  I think I may have to drop it, since it is quite confusing.  It was only ten minutes long, since it was the first week, but I understood absolutely nothing of what he said.  Except when he called my name for roll call.  It's a shame, I am really interesting in learning some winter sports, but I don't think I can take a class all in Korean.  I think I will just join the snowboarding club on campus and tell them I am new, haha!

All of my other classes have been great so far.  The one I am most worried about is still Human Capital and Labour Market Analysis, but it is too late to switch now so I will just have to deal with it and hope I don't die.  All my professors speak great english, even if some of them are a little eccentric.  A great thing about Korea is that it is much cheaper then I had planned for.  Textbooks are MUCH cheaper then I thought they would be, with an "expensive" book being 43 dollars.  Ha!  That was the one class where one of the students was going to photocopy the book and make copys for people because it was expensive.  I had budgeted $1000 just for textbooks, but it looks like it isn't even going to cost 1/5 of that! 

The same thing happened with the insurance I had to buy.  It was around 140 dollars, to be covered for the entire year!  That's crazy.  Even the food is way cheaper then I envisioned.  I had budgeted for $15 per day for food, and I thought that might be too little, but it turns out even if you go out to lunch and dinner to a restaurant (around the university) you end up being within budget!  The cafeteria is even cheaper, with the MOST expensive dish costing 2200 Won, or about $2.30.  That's super awesome.

I have a couple more Korean meat dishes that were excellent.  The first was a dish called Samgyupsal, which is a pork dish that is grilled at the table.  It is pretty popular and it tasted extremely good.  And it was super cheap.

The first photo is of the plate they brought the pork out on.  For $6.5 per person (4 people) we got as many vegatables and sides as you wanted plus two plates of that port.  You could wrap it in lettuce and onions and eat it like a little roll.  This was extremely good.

The second was a pork plate that I ordered at a restaurant myself.  It was also good, but not quite as good as the first.  I'm also not sure what the actual title is, but it is pork belly.

There are a couple aspects of korean restaurants that are different than in the U.S.  When you arrive, you just sit wherever you want.  Then, in most restaurants, the bill or ticket is already at the table and you just check what you want and take it up to the counter to order.  This varys from place to place but it is common that the waiter won't really do anything for you except bring you your food.  In the restaurant where I got Samgyupsal, you had to get your own side dishes and vegetables (which was actually fine since you could of course grab as much as you wanted!)  And in almost every restaurant I've been too, they either bring you a container of water at the start, and these little water cups, or you get up and go get your own water.

I've also noticed that it seems like Korean people tend to not drink a lot of water with their meal.  The cups that they serve water in everywhere are extremely small compared to the US so I tend to drink 4-5 cups, whereas the korean people I am with drink only one or two cups at most.  Also, it seems like they sometimes drink water at the end of the meal, not during it.  In the cafetera at my university, everyone gets water at the very end of the meal, grabbing a cup and drinking by the water station.  It is definately different than the U.S.

Anyway, that is my update.  I think I will add more as I remember in smaller, bite sized stuff since this is a casual journal-esque blog.

First Week Stuff

I got here on Wensday, August 27th.  It's now Wensday, September 3rd, so one whole week!  I have had 3 classes so far, and they are all very interesting and won't seem to be too much of a problem.  I have had Human Capital and Labour Market Analysis, Urban Administration and Trade issues and policies.  They have all actually been very interesting so far.  One funny thing is, now two of my professors have somewhat singled me out in a funny way.  One of them, trade issues and policies, is a white professor.  He was talking about his background, and how he had planned to come to Korea for a year to teach or something.  Then he looks over at me really quickly and says "you may have to watch out for this" and then looks back to the rest of the class, "I met a girl, got married, had kids, and now I've been stuck here for 13 years".  Hahaha.  It isn't as awkward as it sounds.  My Urban Administration professor did a similar thing to me, threading questions about relationships into his lecture on Korean homogeniousness.  It's fuuny.

A good thing about studying abroad is everything is cheaper.  I paid $43 for a brand new textbook, one that probably would cost around $80 in the U.S.  I just paid for my insurance for the entire year, which was only ~135 dollars.  That's crazy.  I can also get food in the cafeterria for like $1-2 dollars for a huge meal!  And it is pretty good food too, although mostly i have just had Ramen since I can't read the main dish menu (It's all in Korean!).  I can read what all of the side dishes are though, with my limited korean, so that is helpful!

Food is even cheap in other places too.  I went to a restaurant with my roomate, Gong Son, for dinner the other night.  I had "JeyukBokkem", which came with the main dish of some sort of incredible meat (maybe beef) and 5 side dishs, along with rice and seafood soup, for 5 dollars.  pretty crazy!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/89/Korean_cuisine-Jeyuk_bokkeum-01.jpg

My room is pretty nice.  The dormitory is extremely quiet at all hours, which is unusal and did not happen in Hilo.  The desks are nice, there is air conditioning, and the shower is hot and powerful.  It also came with a mini fridge!  When I first got here, there was a bunch of stuff already in the room, like some random pencils, lint cleaners, a large coat rack, and 30 different shampoos.  I thought it was my roomates, but it turned out he thought it was my stuff, as he didnt even arrive at the school until sunday!  We got a dirty room right off the bat...  But the advantage was, someone left a bunch of soda in the fridge, so we can't complain too much.

Korea is pretty nice right now.  It has rained the past few days but it is generally sunny and nice.  An interesting tidbit I noticed today is, even though it just started a very light rain, EVERYONE has an umbrella.  Literally everyone.  In Hawaii, if it started raining, sure some people would pull out their umbrella, but not everyone would have one.  Here, every single person I saw today had an umbrella.  It was a little surreal.  Even for a tiny light misting.

On that note, it is a little shocking sometimes to be here.  For example, when you are the only white person on the subway, or the only white person in the entire cafeteria.  I normally just act normal and pretend like I belong but it is a little surreal sometimes.

Yup.