Korea

So, last year I told everyone, "I'm going to be an exchange student in South Korea for my senior year of high school." Sure that's what I said, but I didn't really believe my own words. So here I am in South Korea and this is my life.

Friday, September 02, 2005

Guess What. I'm in Korea. It's still very difficult to believe. I'm having a great time, but sometimes confusion ways me down pretty hard and I need to just take some time out to think. Today for example was my first day of math class, yes I decided to take a math class. I haven't had math for a year so the language of math was almost as difficult as the Korean language for me to understand. I took some time out and read an entry in my journal from Erik Peterson that said to pray when I get completely lost. I'm going to have to start taking his advice to heart and hope for guidience or at least a little more clarity during certain classes. Anyway, this is my schedule (each class is 50 minutes long and classes begin at 8:30)...Monday 1.Japanese 2.Korean (Like KSL or something, basic Korean for Torie, the other exchange student, and me) 3. Gym 4. Music Tuesday 1. Korean 2. English listening 3. English Speaking with 2nd year students 4. English Speaking with 1st year students. Wednesday 1. Computer 2. Art 3. English Speaking (exactly the same as the day before, so we might drop the other one and spend that hour in the library studying Korean or Tae Kwan Do.) 4. Korean. Thursday 1.Chapel (it is a christian school) 2. Math 3. Gym (today we ran a Kilometer. I did it in 7min 30secs. I was the 4th or 5th girl in my class to finish.) 4. Korean. Friday 1. Japanese 2. Music 3. Art 4. Korean. Torie (Her full name is Victoria Scovill and she's from Wayzeta by the way) and I are finished with school after 4th hour and lunch. We then have Tae Kwan Do for two hours sometime in the afternoon. We're working very hard and most of the class is in Korean with bits of broken English for our sake. Tae Kwon Do is my favorite place in Korea so far. We usually have class with elementary children,and although the Grand Master of our gym, Keun Hyung Cho, is internationally recognized and even has a street in Riverside California named after his demonstration team, we recieve most of our instruction from Seung Bum Kim who is actually still in middle school. He's 14 or 15 years old. I get confused by the Korean age system (a system that makes me currently 19 years old) Anyway although he is very young I am absolutely amazed by him, because he is on the demonstration team that travels internationally and he is also one of the main instructors at the gym. It is nice learning from someone nearly the same age and actually younger then us, because then we know it is possible to become that accomplished. We also watch elementary kids who can do amazing things.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.