First week of classes, Everland and Snow!

The first week of classes is now over and we are decently into the second week. I like my courses quite a bit so far. After a bit of revision, I am now taking Human Computer Interface, Artificial Intelligence, Data Structures, Logic Design and Advanced Korean for Foreigners.

I had the Korean class for the first time today and it was much harder than I anticipated! I originally tried to register for the intermediate level one but it conflicted with my time table. In this class, the professor speaks only in Korean, which is alright because she speaks very clearly and is quite understandable, but the writings we have to read are very difficult for me. Needless to say, I spent a lot of time pouring over the dictionary tonight when I got home...

Apart from that course, all of the others are taught in English, with the exception of a '15-minute summarization' in Korean at the end of each Human Computer Interface class. The Korean professors all seem extremely competent and their English is much better than I expected. The semester looks like it will be quite enjoyable :).

About a week ago or so (maybe a little more), I went exploring around Seoul with 윤경. Here is a picture from that day with a statue of King Sejong!

This weekend I went to Everland with some of the people from the SNU Buddy program. Everland is a big amusement park in Korea. We rode a decent chunk of the rides (I think so, at least). Most of them were pretty fun, but the cold weather made it less enjoyable than it could have been. I forgot my camera, so all I managed to get was this picture of the park map that I took a few minutes ago:

Today we had a strange bit of weather... I was kind of surprised, and displeased. It has been snowing for the past few hours now, and I went out to get some food with a friend from Australia and ended up taking a few pictures along the way. Here is the result of tonight's bit of snow (It was totally dry yesterday...).

It looks pretty and all, but i'm used to our lovely tempid weather in Victoria, and this is a little extreme for mid-March... It's -3 degrees at the moment.

As well, I also got a cell phone and made a bank account today. I couldn't make them up until this point because I didn't have my Alien Registration card yet (외국인 등록증). My phone isn't amazing, but it definitely seems to be better than the one I had in Canada! It was 80,000원 (about $75 CAD), and it comes with a few games, cable TV (just one channel, SBS), a couple radio news stations and the normal texting/calling, etc. It's a contract phone, but instead of a plan with a certain number of minutes/texts included, I just have the default 12,000원 per month plan with nothing included, and every text message costs 20원 and every 10 seconds of calling costs 18원 (incoming calls are free).

All in all, i'm pretty settled now and have most things that I need. All I need to do now is finish preparing my student card. This Thursday night or Friday I will hopefully get a chance to go meet Kurt Lee (이충규) in Cheonan (천안), as he has a few days of vacation from his military service.

Sorry for the lack of updates lately! I'm not used to this blogging business yet :P.

A la prochaine,
감사합니다

-Curtis