April 9th - 15th

This week has been a little more hectic compared to the other weeks because all the Korean students are studying/stressing for their midterms. I only have one test and one essay, but the test isn't until the 23rd and the essay isn't due until May 8th so I'm not worrying like some of the other students are. This week was also our last week with the MMS partners that we have right now. We get about 2 weeks of break from our MMS and team meetings, and they will start back up once midterms are done with. When they do start up again, we will be with different partners for the individual meetings but the teams stay the same. The first partners that we had were assigned at random but this time the Korean students get to choose who they want. However, it's first come first serve so if they don't get there early enough, the slots for someone that they wanted to pick might all be full. I talked to some of the Korean students who have done the program before about it, and they all said it's really competitive. For one of my meetings this week (with Seojin) she had me help her with her resume which was a nice change because for a lot of my meetings they didn't really know what they wanted to do, so it made it hard to find a good way to help them with their English besides by just talking with them. She wanted one that was more designed since the Korean resumes that she showed me all had basically the same format and she wanted one that would make her stand our if she were to apply to a non-Korean company. We worked on it for about an hour and a half and got the layout and the basic information filled in. For my last meeting with Sally (Ju Yeong) we had made plans to go get tacos in Wonju. She took me to a little taco place that was right next to the traditional market. So after we were done eating, she took me there because she wanted to show me one of her favorite stores. The market was a really interesting place because there was the outside market that had pop up stands full of fresh food and little shops that sold a bunch of random things. Then there was the shops that were inside a building, sort of like a mall but it had a different atmosphere than a mall would because the halls were really narrow and it didn't have the greatest lighting. We looked around for a little bit and she couldn't remember where the shop was that she liked, so she asked somebody and they told us it was closed because of some construction going on in the building. After that she took me outside to another little shopping area and showed me around there. She also told me that she wants to have me again for an MMS partner and I'm hoping that she does because I always have a lot of fun during our meetings. This week, one of the American students (Marisa) and one of the Korean Students (Leo/Yu Seok) had their birthdays on the same day! However, Leo has been gone for the past 2 weeks because he's been in a teaching program that lasts a month. There wasn't a lot we could do for her since it landed on a Tuesday and most people were busy, but a few of us managed to take her our for dinner. Plus, she had gone into Seoul last weekend with some people to celebrate. We also have a little break from our Korean Culture class so we didn't have a field trip this week, so instead, Marie, Dari, Eevie, John, Josue, and I went into Seoul to go see the cherry blossoms. We left on Friday morning around 11 and our train left around 1:40pm. We gave ourselves extra time to get to the train station even though it would only take about 20 minutes to get there from campus. Its a good thing we did though, because Eevie's roommate accidentally told us to go to wrong station and we only figured it out because one of the staff at the station happened to come up to John and Dari and asked us where we were trying to go. So we had to find a taxi to take us to the right station. When we got to Seoul we had to try to find our way to our Airbnb and we did good with the subways but we had a little trouble finding the specific address but, once again, a Korean came up to us and asked if we needed help and she showed us the way. It was a nice place to stay that had three bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a living room, and a little kitchen. The way that the rooms were set up, I ended up getting a room all to myself, which was nice. After we dropped off our stuff, we went back to the subway and made our way to Myeongdong, which was the big street market that I had gone to the first time I was in Seoul. This time though, I didn't do a whole lot of shopping, instead I went into the meerkat cafe that was being advertised. The meerkat cafe is pretty much what it sounds like, except they don't offer food. It's almost like a petting zoo that had a raccoon, a couple of cats, wallabies (they look like small kangaroos), and meerkats running around that you could pet. They also had this tank full of tiny fish that you could pay to stick your feet in and they would nibble at your dead skin. I didn't do this because I was more interested in the wallabies hopping around. After we were done there, we made our way to Hongdae. Hongdae was a really fun place to be at because there was lots of lights, street performers, food vendors, and a lot of shops and restaurants. It almost seemed like being at a fair. We went to an all you could eat samgyeopsal (grilled pork belly) place. The only catch was that they gave you a time limit, so you could pay to stay for either 30 minutes or stay for 90 minutes. We chose 90 minutes. After we were done eating, we looked around the shops for a little bit until we had to leave. The subway stops at midnight so we had to make sure we had time to get back. The next day we went to Insadong, which was fairly close to our Airbnb and we spent a lot of time looking around there and getting some souvenirs. We ate at a really nice looking restaurant and when we first walked in, they brought us to our own private room, but it turns out they thought we were part of a group that had reserved it so we had to go sit somewhere else. Once we were done there, we went to a cafe and their theme was poop. They even served some of their drinks in little cups shaped like toilets. We didn't end up going to see the cherry blossoms because it was kind of cold and rainy out that day, which was disappointing since that was the reason I had wanted to go to Seoul again. On the last day, we didn't have a whole lot of time to do anything, so we basically just packed up our stuff and headed to the bus terminal and went back to Wonju.