Day 3: First Day of Classes & A Night in Hongdae

06.27.18

Today was the first day of classes. We woke up around 7:50am and met up at the kitchenette around 8:15am to find the building that our first class was going to be in. The first class started at 9:00am at the POSCO building in room 306, but since we've never been to the building before, we decided to play safe and get there really early. The first class was Korean History and Folk Tradition taught by a professor from Binghamton University. We followed the campus map online as well as Naver Maps and ended up at the building on schedule. 

There's a campus "cafeteria" attached to the building so we went in there to grab breakfast. Inside that cafeteria, there is the kimbap place where I ended up getting breakfast, but there is also a small Paris Baguette where you can grab some bakeries, as well as The Venti where you can grab a coffee, tea, or non-caffeinated beverage right before class. For the kimbap place, you can order right at the counter or you can order from one of the three electronic kiosks placed to the side of the counter. There are many choices from types of kimbap to types of rice (kimchi fried rice with an egg, curry with rice and tonkatsu, spicy pork with rice, etc). I chose one of their signature kimbaps with tuna in it.

I felt pretty healthy after eating that, considering half of it was veggies -- I don't usually eat breakfast before class in the States, and even then, I don't eat veggies in the morning so this was pretty new. I knew I was going to be hungry during the 2.5-hour class if I didn't eat though, so I ate. This kimbap cost maybe around 3,000 to 4,000 won? Not bad at all.

After we finished eating, we headed up for class. The first day, there were no curriculum plans so the class was basically 2.5 hours of us introducing ourselves and where we're from as well as the teacher going through the syllabus, answering questions, and then giving us a brief lecture on Korean culture to pass time.

Class finished at 11:30am on the dot, just in time for lunch. We all headed to the Shinsegae food hall located in the ECC main building for food. There, you have the option of ordering at the counter if you are paying cash or ordering at the electronic kiosk if you are paying with a credit card. Both ways allow you to use the student discount as long as you present your student ID card or scan it at the electronic kiosk. The food at the food hall is slightly more expensive than the food you may be able to find at a small restaurant outside or at the staff cafeteria, but it is in a super convenient location and the student discount makes it a bit more reasonable.

My first meal at the food hall was kimchi spicy pork over rice -- it was pretty good, but maybe I just love Korean food in general and I haven't really been to a restaurant that could mess up a dish like kimchi spicy pork over rice. There are also banchan (side dishes) in the cafeteria that are self-serve, so you can grab a dish and fill it up with as much kimchi and radish as you want. A water dispenser is also available for use at the food hall which you can use to fill up your water or just fill up the flimsy paper cups provided next to the dispenser. (I suggest taking 2 or 3 of those cups together before filling it up because it's reaaaaally weak material.)

After lunch, we had a few hours to kill before the next class: Korean language. The Korean language class was located at the Shinsegae building right behind the I-House dormitory and next to the Ewha Elementary School, so it was a really convenient 5-minute walk from our dorms. Class started at 3:30pm and lunch really only took about 30 minutes. We decided to take a walk around campus and see where we ended up, so we explored the library, the other dormitories, the music building, and other academic buildings on campus. Ewha is basically on a mountain as I like to say every time I climb up a road, so we were left panting at the top of every road we walked. Everyone else looked fine, so we decided to pretend like it didn't pain us either. But man, the roads were steep.

We also discovered where the shuttle bus stops were, but we actually never took the shuttle bus during our stay at Ewha. We found that there was no need to because we lived near everything, and the 10 minute walk to the POSCO building was easier (in my opinion) than waiting on line for the shuttle bus in front of the school to get there. And trust me, the lines do get pretty long the closer you're cutting to 9:00am.

Poster found in the science building from K-pop group SHINee that reads "I'm cheering on the you that shines more than anyone." 

Walking for almost two hours really tired us, but it passed the time really well. By the time we made it down the "mountain", we had 30 minutes before class time and decided to find the building and classroom and get there early. The Korean class I was in was the intermediate class (201). We found out what classes we got into about 30 minutes before actual class time, which all of us thought was ridiculous. However, we heard from the first class that Ewha actually switched their whole International Summer College staff team this summer and they had no idea what they were doing. So that made extreme sense as almost 200 students were left hanging until the last minute on which classroom and class level they belonged in.

Luckily, class started without too much of a hitch and the teacher was really nice. He went over the syllabus and we actually started working on lesson one from the textbook. (I forgot to mention, we bought the textbooks right before class at the Kyobo bookstore inside the ECC main building. It's next to the food hall, and the Korean textbooks were all in one place under the table in the foreign language section of the store). We learned that we would have two Korean teachers for class, a man that would teach on Mondays and Wednesdays and a woman who would teach us on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Korean class was three hours long, running from 3:30pm to 6:30pm, so it was a bit of a stretch in terms of attention span, but we got through it well because the teacher tried so hard to keep us entertained.

This is a photo of my Korean class, taken on the last day of classes in between our final exams. 

The class size was only 12 students but really fluctuated during the first few days because some students were mistakenly placed into the 201 class either because they missed the staff messed up the placement or the student missed the oral placement test the previous day and thought they belonged in intermediate. After the first week, the student count was pretty much settled and we stayed at the 12 students that are present in the picture above. The class had students from Taiwan, California, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and America. It was a pretty exciting class. Because the class was so small and we spent 3 hours together everyday, everyone got pretty friendly with each other and talked a lot during breaks. We also joked a lot during the oral practices everyday where we would have to make dialogues with each other to practice using grammar.

 After class, my friends and I decided to head to Hongdae for a samgyupsal (pork barbecue) dinner. Yes, it was the first day of classes. Go big or go home. We went to a restaurant that I had tried once during my first visit to Korea this past May (I came for a week with family and got to visit the Ewha campus once as a tourist), and I loved this restaurant when I first tried it so I had to bring my friends. They also saw my pictures on Facebook and really wanted to come. 

This restaurant appeared in many dramas (dramas whose screenshots are posted in front of the restaurant for good marketing material) and is unique in that the meat is actually cooked on...rocks? Anyway, it was really good and an enjoyable meal. We just got 3 portions of belly pork to eat and it really got us satisfied, especially since this was the first Korean barbecue we had in Korea. The meal was 11,000 won per person, so it wasn't too bad of a price for barbecue. 

After filling ourselves up, we decided to walk around. My friends wanted dessert, but I wanted to show them the super crowded streets of Hongdae first -- Hongdae's night life always excited me. There, they have clubs, shopping, more shopping, street food, lots of tarot places, and most importantly, lots of buskers and university students from Hongik University out for a night of fun. Walking around first proved to be a good choice, as we somehow ended up at the Hongdae Street Music Festival (홍대 거리 응원 뮤직 페스티벌) that we didn't even know was happening.

There was even a surprise after all the DJ-ing; there were three special guests who joined, one which we all loved: the rapper and Unpretty Rapstar contestant Jessi!! I took many videos and some photos which I don't have on hand right now, but I'll add them to the post later when I find them. We were so hyped that we could randomly find something like this on our second day in Korea. After the concert was over, the MCs started hyping everyone up for the World Cup because the World Cup match between Korea and Germany was starting that night. It was crazy. Everyone was screaming to cheer for Korea, chanting Dae Han Min Guk super loud.

It was lit. We stayed at the Hongdae Festival a little past twenty minutes of the soccer match since we had class the next morning. It was around 11:30pm and we would've stayed a little longer if it hadn't been a fact that we had class early the next morning. Attendance was taken pretty seriously since at Ewha, the syllabus placed 30~40% of the grades in the hands of attendance. We didn't want to get on Ewha's bad side.

In the end, we took the subway back to Ewha and made it back to the dorm a little past midnight. Honestly, after this day, I realized how nice it was to just be able to walk around in random places and find unexpected things. This was really unexpected, and it made it that much more fun. Exploring the streets of Seoul with friends guarantees you finding something new. 

- End of Day 3 -