Day 2- Walking around and misnomers

After going to sleep, I woke up when it was light outside feeling moderately refreshed. A-ha, thinks, I. It must be around eight or so in the morning- there's going to be some time to hang around the room until my city tour at noon. So, not having a phone or anything of the sort by which to measure time, I open my laptop to find (to my dismay) that it is 5:45...AM. Oy. So, I groan and my roommate has yet to stir. Hopping back into bed, I'm trying to get to sleep and it works to a degree. Around 9:00AM, my roommate stirs and we chat for awhile. Again, it isn't the absolute best form due to our language skills. Though, I'm picking a bit of Korean up along the way.

Now, today at noon was supposed to be the tour of Seoul, the city. This was somewhat of a misnomer for reasons I will go into later. So, after taking about a half hour to go the quarter mile to the plaza near the subway station, we stop to eat this sushi like dish (the staff had brought it with them) which was all well and good, except for the fact that we (the thirty or so students) only spent fifteen minutes eating and just sorta sat there for the next twenty or so before we were led onto the subway.

Now, as a disclaimer, I haven't been on subways often and as such am also not accustomed to being very close to large numbers of people all at once. This combined with my poor Korean language skills made me nervous about being in public, not to mention being in a very large city (I live in the suburbs). This will be relevant later.

So, we hop onto the subway, and it has been years since I've been on a subway (last time was on a Metro in DC) so keeping my balance was tough as there was not enough handholds for people and I sorta just had to chill there. By the second or so stop, I met the first person in the nation of Korea who pissed me off. Yes, it was an American.

She walked on amidst the crowd of people and the following conversation occurred.

Her: I'm getting that you seem a little uncomfortable.
Me: Eh. (It's true, due to the aforementioned reasons, so as a result, I'm just looking around at the different people getting on and off)
Her: Hmph. You have a nice day.
Me: ???

She doesn't exit the subway, she just stands sorta by me. I'm confused. My thought (and this is based on the latter comment) is that she thought it was a racial reason why I was uncomfortable. The following conversation occurred a stop or so later:

Her: I'm guessin' you're from America?
Me: Yeah.
Her: I'm from Atlanta. What do you think of our president?
Me: Huh? What about him? He has a really difficult job...
Her: You need to LEARN to LOVE your president.
Me: Oh. Yeah, I mean I-
Her: You have a nice day!
Me: (sigh- exits the subway)

Wasn't sad to leave her there in the subway. She had some kind of axe to grind and I appeared to be the closest target. Guess she dealt with her stress or whatever it was. Just annoyed me was all. I was sincerely just anxious about being in a huge city for the first time and her shooting her mouth off did not make me feel any better. In fact, the only sincerely annoying person I met today was her and she was American. Connection? Nevertheless, I'm not going to sing praises to a politician nor anyone else I feel indifferent about.

So, eventually we got to a plaza which is called Gwanghwamun Square. We met up with this interesting tour guide guy, whose name was not told to us, or if so, I cannot remember any great emphasis being put on it. So, let's just call him Mr. Park. The Square was an interesting area to say the least. Park led the group of us around one of the side parts of the plaza, which had some kind of almost gutter by it, though upon closer inspection it was more like a small inches deep trench, that was made up of different blocks. As we neared the one end of the plaza, the blocks had years inscribed on them along with words that I could not read. Park explained that every year Korea remains a country, they add another block in the trench and carve in it the world events of the year. Neat concept.

Also, in addition to that, there were two statues, one of this guy Admiral Yi Sunshin. He was this great Korean navel hero whose innovation stopped Japanese invaders by redesigning their boats. Back in ye olde 1500s, the Japanese basically had Korea up against the wall navally and this admiral had the idea of completely covering up their boats, giving them a roof of wood with spikes and nails, so that no invaders could board it during an attack, called appropriately a turtle ship. This innovation caused him to push back the Japanese invaders.


The second statue was of King Sejong, a man from the late 1300s. He was an emperor who enjoyed writing. So, as a result, he decided to create Hangul (the Korean language) as the Chinese language was too difficult to read and write for the common person (thousands upon thousands of characters). Instead, King Sejong determined that the new language would just have twenty or so characters (which were solely syllables) which were derived from five or so brush strokes and make up twenty or so letters and could be used for a large combination of final syllables. I'll go into the whole speech/grammar part later, when I start speech/grammar classes.

To top it off, there was a museum UNDER GROUND the plaza about the two men that were above it. Pretty cool, in my mind. It was dark and cool. There was a replica of a turtle ship and a few other cool things. There were also a few shooting games that one could play, mimicking what it was like to be on a Korean war ship. It was quite fun. There was also a rowing simulator game with a 1400s style oar where the player had to row fast enough to "catch" a ship ahead of him or her.

We walked a bit further to the cultural art museum. There were a few cool things there, foremost of which was a Cadillac from the early 1900s (1910?) that was used by an Empress. Also a few stranger items were placenta jars, which, I can only assume were used to collect the placenta of the children of an emperor. There was an explanation, but it was entirely in Korean. :(

After plowing through the art museum in the middle of downtown, our guide bid us farewell. And so did the staff members.

Staff: So..yeah. Have fun now!
Us: Huh?
Staff: Yeah, go do whatever.
Us: Um...like go back to the dorms or what?
Staff: Sure. Just you know how to get back to Hanyang, right?
Us: Not really...
Staff: You'll figure it out! Bye!
Us: ...

So, it was around 5 PM, the tour was over. Now, for this to make sense, you need to understand Seoul is a HUGE city and as such for a tour of the city, the group of us were expecting a tour bus or something of that ilk. Now, we had been on foot walking since noon or so and had seen three or so sites of the metropolis. "Tour of Seoul?" I think not. But it was pleasant, though it was around seven or so when I got back to my dorm room and we had been on our feet. A lot. I was with a group of people from my university:

Miranda- Did not say much, except for the occasional snarky comment
Libby- A popular type, has the "princess" vibe going off of her. She didn’t talk much, but seemed annoyed at the whole turn of events
Nancy- Pleasant enough girl, but complained often when we got back to the university and couldn't find the dorms. To be fair, we had been on our feet for the past seven or so hours, but yes, we get it. You too are tired.
Jim- Dating Nancy. Seems like the Student Government/frat type. Pleasant enough though.

I didn't say much on our walk back. Neither Miranda nor Libby were that chatty either. I was tired and I honestly don't know these people well enough to open up about anything. Though only really Nancy noticed that the three of us weren't talking when she paused after arguing about directions with Jim but I really didn't do anything to remedy that.

So, tonight though, will be the Korea/Uruguay game. Need to figure out what colors to wear (and more importantly NOT to wear). Red seems to be a safe bet for Korea though. Will write more later.

-Reven