March 26th - April 1st

This week has been a long one, but in a good way. I feel like I did a lot of activities that really made this one of the more memorable ones. It was a little hard to get the Korean students to go outside at the beginning of the week even though it was super nice out (60 to 70 degrees) because the ultra fine dust levels were apparently really bad. The ultra fine dust is air pollution that can cause damage the respiratory system and has been linked to some diseases. On Monday the 26th, I was approached by one of the girls from the Miami group and she told me that she had heard that I am in graphic design. So when I said yes, she asked me for some advice on designing a logo for her water-skiing club back at their school. She was in charge of updating their logo so it read better on merchandise. Since class was about to start I set up a time for a little later in the day and I told her that I could help her. So we met at around 5 and she had a pretty clear vision of what she wanted for it but just wasn't really sure how to actually make it. So we worked for about and hour or 2 and I would make suggestions or adjustments when I thought that they were needed. Overall it was a quickly done logo, but I think it turned out the way that she wanted it too and it didn't need to be 100% yet since she wanted to make sure the other club members liked the direction that it was going in. She wanted to give me some sort of payment, but I told just buy me dinner sometime and we would call it even since it was a pretty simple and easy logo to design. I spent almost the whole day outside with different students for my MMS meetings on Thursday because the air was better than it had been the past couple of days. It was nice because I would tell my MMS partners where I was, they would stay for their required hour (or longer) and other people from the program would come and go too. We just had a couple of card games set up and we would start new games once we had enough people. As we were playing the different games we would talk to the Korean students and answer any questions that they might have about English. On Friday, I went with a group of people to a part of Wonju that I haven't seen before. It was had a bunch of random, little stores along the street and we walked around there for a little bit. While I was walking around with one other girl, the rest of the group went to a hair salon to get there hair dyed, so I was able to go into whatever stores I wanted to. Also, later that night, I went to the movies with another group of people. We saw Ready Player One and I thought that it was a really good movie, I would definitely recommend it. On Saturday, I had made plans to go hiking in Baegunsan Recreational Forest. It was Bu-Kyung, Isaac, Cameron (from the Miami group), Jasper, Heung-Won, and I. We left at about 8:30 in the morning and somehow we managed to get into the park before it opened thanks to Bu-Kyung who talked to one of the staff members. The first part of the climb was a road that had a very slight incline and we walked on that for about an hour. I don't know why, but I was expecting the entire way to the peak to be like that. I was wrong. We eventually got to a split in the path and one way kept going along the road, while the other way was up some steep stairs. We didn't think that the stairs were the way to the peak but we were curious as to where they went, so we climbed up. Turns out they lead to what I can only describe as the most intense path to get to the peak. We climbed up really steep slopes for what seemed like miles and at some points we had to use the ropes along the paths in order to pull ourselves up. At our first break, we found out we had only traveled about 0.7 kilometers. After about 5 minutes of break time to catch our breaths and drink some water. We then kept going and every time I thought we were getting close, there would just be another steep slope to climb. At some points it was really muddy, so we kept slipping trying to climb up and had to heavily rely on the rope. There was also ice and snow in some places too, which did not make things easier. At our next break we couldn't really figure out where to go because the sign was pointing at a bunch of rocks. We eventually figured out we had to climb up the rocks to get to the next part of the path. The path was a little hard to figure out from there, we kept having to look around for path markers but we eventually made it to the top. After we spent some time at the top, we decided to head back down. I thought that the way down was a lot easier than going up, but not everyone felt that way. Cameron, Bu-Kyung, and I got really far ahead of the other 3 because there was still some snow on the mountain but it didn't bother us as much as it did them. So after about 30 minutes of basically sliding down the mountain, the 3 of us came to a clearing that I think was part of a military base. We waited there for the other 3 to catch up and we got back onto the road that we were on earlier. It took us about 2 hours to walk back and overall we hiked from about 8:45a.m. to about 2:00p.m.. After that we went out to get eat since we were all pretty hungry. On Sunday (today) I woke up very sore from hiking and it hurts to walk. I stayed in bed until I got a message from another GV girl. We had talked about getting food for Easter to make for everyone. So we went to the store and bought a bunch of ingredients. We ended up making pasta (with tomato sauce), fried chicken cutlets, and pasta salad. It took us a few hours to make it, but we managed to make a lot of food. We made so much that it got to the point that we just started grabbing students from the hall and giving them food. Everyone had a good time and it really felt like a makeshift Easter dinner and it was a great way to end the week!