CLASS!

For the past couple of months family and friends have been asking me a lot if I feel safe going back to South Korea, or if the government will even send us there, with the current instability in North Korea. As someone with a bit of a "hakuna matata" outlook on life, I never seemed to worry much about that. The security briefing we had yesterday did nothing to change that.

They pretty much reaffirmed what we already knew, but we did get to learn about some general issues with the South Korean economy that I didn't know about before. First was a panel of people briefing us about what the US Embassy will do to help us during our stay here. Then some military guy came out and talked a bit about the strong relationship between the US military and Korean military. He said a bunch of non-politically correct stuff that military guy's are privy to say because it's not their job to sugar coat stuff. He pretty much said not to worry at all about the missiles that are on the news now. If they were aimed at us, they'd prolly hit Taiwan or the Philippines cause the range is too long.

After that, we were given freedom to wander around Seoul. A bunch of us found our way to ChungGyeChon, and walked along it for a bit. It's one of my most favorite places in Seoul. Afterwards, Meredith, Zury, Billy, Damon, and I went for some lunch around the area.

Then we began our mission of the day, which was to get my cellphone working, and to get new ones for the others. I think it took about an hour or two to figure everything out, but we finally got out of there and walked to the Han River, which we were only 15 minutes north of. It's a shame the river is so dirty, because I'm sure it must have been beautiful 50 or more years ago.

Meredith and I met up with SeRyun and Joyce for dinner in Shinsa-dong, which is a really cute area by Apgu-jung. It was a little bit pricy, but we had pretty good pho. It was really good to see Joyce again too after 5 months. She was my roommate in Japan. We got back to Suwon at 11pm exhausted from the heat, and not quite recovered from the jet lag.

Today was the first day of class, and it seemed to go quite well. The teacher seems really passionate, and really enjoys teaching. There's only 8 of us in the class, which is great. I'm happy I got placed in Professor Lee's class and that I belong in Intermediate B with the rest of these guys. Four hours flew by in no time, although I admit by the 4th hour I was looking at my watch quite often. But I can't help that, it's my ADD. I hope I can keep up with the work, 7 weeks of study... 2 big textbooks.... we'll see how it goes.

When class was over, a bunch of the language buddies who were unable to give their CLS people campus tours on Monday went around today and I got to tag along. The more I see of this campus, the more it reminds me of Korea University in terms of beauty and architecture, which makes me miss it there even more. My language buddy is in Mongolia for this entire week (no joke), so I won't be able to meet her until next week.