May 28th - June 3rd

This week was the last week for our team meetings and I believe it was also the last week for our MMS meetings too, but I get the feeling that most of the Korean students didn't know that because they were acting like they would see me the next week. I'm going to miss the meetings, because it was a good chance to sit with the students one on one instead of a big group of students. For one of my meetings this week, Seo-Jin helped me to mail a package back home that was full of souvenirs. I've shipped a letter home before and it was pretty easy, but the package was a lot more work. Seo-Jin was talking with the staff member for a while before they actually figured out how I wanted it to be shipped. I had looked up my options online before I had asked her for help, so I knew exactly how I wanted it to be done, but since the workers don't speak English, I just needed help with the translations. There are about 3 different ways that I could have shipped it. The cheapest, but slowest way was by a ship and it could take 1 to 3 months to arrive, so I didn't want to do that one. The most expensive, but fastest one took only about 5 to 7 days by plane, and I didn't want to do that one either. I wanted the one that was in the middle, where it takes about 10 to 14 days to arrive and its cheaper than the fastest way. She helped me fill our the necessary form, then we realized that it was the wrong one, so we had to fill our a different one, but it asked pretty much all of the same questions and we were finally able to get it shipped.

This week was also our last field trip for the Korean Culture Experience class and we got to go to the National Museum of Korea. The students from Miami didn't go on this trip because they were all in Jeju, so we got to spend the last field trip just with our group. I really like going to museums, but most of the other students don't so they weren't very excited about this trip. The museum was really big and it also had a couple different buildings. The first building that we went to was the National Hangeul Museum. Hangeul is the Korean alphabet that is used today and it was invented by King Sejong in 1443. We got to learn about its creation and we even got to see the book were Hangeul is first explained. After we were done learning about its history, we got to go to an exhibition that they had on another floor called “Sounds X Hangeul: Variation of the Korean Alphabet.” This is the 2nd Hangeul Design Project that the museum has had since 2016 and they use Hangeul as the inspiration for the designs. After we were done with that part we went to the second building and at that one, it was mostly just historical items and we got to learn about them.

After we got back from the field trip, Marisa, Jay, Marcella, Sungeun, Josue, and I went to roller skating in the same building that we had gone bowling in. It's been a long time since I have been roller skating so it was a little difficult at first but I got the hang of it eventually. When we were first getting ready, the staff there made us put on a bunch of protective gear. We had to wear knee pads, elbow pads, wrist braces, helmets, and they made Marcella put on padded shorts, but she took those off pretty quickly. After a few times around, they let us take off everything but our knee pads. After we were done skating, they had a little arcade area so we spent a little while in there and we managed to get in a photo booth with all 6 of us. They also had archery set up, so I tried that and I wasn't very good, but most my arrows hit the target at least. The next day, Marisa, Jay, Marcella, and I went back to Gyeongpo beach in Gangneung. So we spent most he day there, and we even met a girl who was teaching English here and she was from New Zealand. The water was still pretty cold, but there were people actually swimming this time. After we got back to campus, Marisa, Marcella, Josue, and I decided to get some dinner.