Well, first the good news! I passed all my mid-terms with over 95% in all of them. The speaking exam turned out to be the far most challenging out of them all, though. While they didn’t ask you anything new or even challenging in the written ones, they seem to expect that you have learned additional spoken Korean outside of the classroom, and will throw vocabulary and expression not covered during class time at you (not so much that you could fail if you only knew the class-words and expressions by heart, but enough that you could only get a passing grade if you had never once used Korean outside of the classroom). A-ha! So this is where they’ve been hiding their difficulty! Luckily, I have used it quite a bit in my free time so the speaking exam was easy as well.

In not so-great-news, I am damn sick. I’ve caught one-sided tonsillitis, and my left tonsil is about twice to 2.5 times the size of my right, uninfected one. In addition to that, my left tonsil shows fashionable white spots, and causes me to wince in pain when I swallow even just saliva. Oh, the joy of tonsillitis! A good friend and frequent visitor in my childhood whose visits have become increasingly rare with my ascension to adulthood has finally found its way back to find me once more….!

And they told me I wouldn’t have to worry about tonsillitis anymore once I became an adult.  -_-

I’m in the very strange situation that I usually can’t sleep during the night at all. I tend to have a high fever during the night, and instead of sleeping, I’ll have restless fever hallucinations and my thoughts are just stumbling over each other and bumping into each other like a bunch of intoxicated amusement park go-karters. They go something like this:

“I should go to the pharmacy tomorrow…”

- “The girl had green hair and a horn on her forehead.”

- “Maybe the elevator in the building is on fire.”

- “Then she saw him and smiled.”

- “Asterix and Obelix are running a marathon!”

- “Yes, I should go to the pharmacy.”

- “And the flying soju bottle with the freckles winked at me.”

- “Then she walked over to him and said hi. Is that a good idea?”

- “Yes, I think I should definitely go to the pharmacy!”

As you can see, they didn’t make a whole lot of sense. I hate fever hallucinations.

I’m not sure where I caught tonsillitis, but I think I may have last Friday when I went out to Hana and met some of my friends there. It was a good night (I got a bit too drunk, though). Some Korean girls were marvelling over my big breasts and asked me if they could touch them. I said sure. Then they poked it with their fingers and oohed and aahed about how soft they were. It was funny.

Last Friday, I took my reading/listening and grammar mid-terms and yesterday I took my writing test. I can say with full confidence that I got 100% (or damn close) on all three of them, and I wasn’t the only one – from what my classmates told me, all of them are pretty sure they aced it, as well.

And how couldn’t they? The exams were ridiculously easy. Maybe it’s because we’re the most advanced level 1 class and to most of us, everything we covered in the first half of level 1 was nothing but a more in-depth repetition of stuff we’d already learned, but I think that the test should have been dead easy even for the slower and less advanced level 1 classes. Sogang really drills the few things you learn into your head and makes sure you don’t forget them. Lots of valuable teaching time is lost drilling the same words everybody already knows over and over again.

I can’t say I am too happy with this method. I hope that they start to spend more time on teaching and less on practicing and, most of all, start to teach more vocabulary.  I don’t think I learned many words at Sogang so far and I look with envious eyes at Yonsei students who complain about having to learn too many. Between the two extremes, I prefer too many rather than too few. Challenge wins over boredom.

Not to confuse anyone, I’m not going to quit on Sogang or transfer or anything yet. It’s far too early for that and the difficulty may very well increase in later levels. It’s just that I feel a little bit bored in the afternoons, but lack the motivation (most of the time) to do studying on my own. When I do study on my own, though, I find it most effective to watch Korean dramas reading the scripts and looking up all the words I don’t know. It’s a great supplement to Sogang because 5 minutes of drama gives me dozens of unknown words to study. I figure that whichever language program you choose you are going to have to make up for the areas it neglects in your free time.

In non-school related news, I am addicted to watching Legend, or Tae Wang Sa Shin Gi, a historical/fantasy Korean TV drama that feels like a mix between Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and Final Fantasy.

I also have to finally let off something that’s long overdue – I have to praise my landlady for providing me with more food than I can eat in the mornings and evenings. Sometimes I seriously wonder how they are making any profit at all! They provide free internet (and I make damn good use of it, and download a lot) and in the mornings, the landlady, understanding I’m a Westerner with weird quirks, always offers to make me pancakes, toast, fried eggs or whatever else I want, and I even get fruit to bring back to my room as dessert. She also sometimes asks me what I’d like for dinner, and cooks it for me. Seriously, giving me two big meals a day plus free internet at 350,000 won a month seems like an incredibly good deal to me, especially considering all my classmates are paying close to 500,000 for the same or even slightly inferior services! This is all thanks to my boyfriend who managed to find this wonderful room for me. Thanks a lot!

About one week ago, Sogang University held its annual cultural festival and we foreign students were, of course, expected to participate. I chose to take part in the Hanbok Fashion Show, of which photos can be found here (along with some photos of myself I took in a coffee shop because it seemed like a waste not to take photos when someone had put professional make-up on me ):

 http://neavanille.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=8

We started preparation at around 9 AM with the fashion show scheduled at 2:30 PM, and I didn’t know until approximately 2 PM that I was even going to walk! We ran hopelessly out of suitable hanboks, so the majority of girls didn’t get to participate (horribly incompetent management on Sogang’s part here – they had us register a few days beforehand so they should have known how many of us were going to show up, and prepare enough hanboks for all of us). For about 5 hours, the others girls and I just sat around, chatted (I made several new friends that day and had it not been for them, what ended up being a memorable experience would have deteriorated into an infinitely boring and dull day dragged down by the first 5 hours of sitting around and sloooowly, one-by-one, getting our hair and make-up done). Something that was quite entertaining during the dressing-up process was sneaking looks at the boys next-door who we all felt looked an amazing lot like soldiers or samurai in their curious-looking hanboks.

When it finally came to walking on the stage, I felt it was very thrilling to be watched by so many people, and ended up flashing the crowd peace-signs and making love signs (that’s when you raise both arms and touch your head with your hands, causing your arms to imitate the form of a heart). Later, I ended up dancing (uh, headbanging) on the sideline while we were waiting for some of the other participants to finish their walk, and from what a couple of people told me, I got more attention than the people on the stage. I guess they’d all seen girls walking around in hanboks close to a millionth time, but seeing a girl dancing and shaking her booty in a hanbok might have been somewhat of a novelty.

 In other news, I have mid-terms on Friday. I can’t believe time passed so quickly, and that half of my first term at Sogang is already over! I expect to ace mid-terms and get an A. School is still ridiculously easy, although it has gotten a lot more interesting lately.

The temperatures here are rapidly going south and autumn has long since completely taken over. The blanket I bought 3 months now is much too thin now and I find myself freezing at night. Girls no longer wear mini-skirts on the street (a tragedy, I suppose) and Shinchon is quite empty at night these days while it was consistently bustling at 3 AM throughout the past couple of months. I guess a lot of college students are settling into a quieter life now that summer is over and winter is inevitably going to take over.

Just as well, more time to watch dramas. ;D