July E-mails Continued

July 26, 2009

So today at lunch the Korean student that we sat with was obsessed with the fact that my name was Meghan. He was so impressed that I was asked lots of questions about my boyfriend, Shia LaBeouf. Haha. This country makes the best generalizations/assumptions. You would fit in here, they love the transformers….

July 20, 2009

Ahh i just found a cute coffee shop and had a sweet cheese panini...best korean food ever!

July 19, 2009

Hello!!

Well I am back from Songnisan. It was a wonderful weekend, so beautiful! Yesterday I hiked up a mountain. It was probably the biggest physical challenge I have ever accomplished in my life. I thought at many points that my body was going to collapse, but we all pulled through together and made it to two different peaks. The view was well worth the pain. It took about 6.5 hours to go up to both peaks and then to come back down. The hotel was authentic, so after a long day of hiking I got to sleep on a mat on the floor. Today my body is pretty sore, not to mention I still can't laugh without my abs hurting from the sit ups we had to do at TKD on Thursday.

 We are treated like royalty by the Fulbright office. The food was amazing this weekend and we had lots of ice cream! I am exhausted to say the least. We just got back and have a meeting in five minutes, I have mandatory study hours after that, then office hours and need to prepare my lesson for tomorrow. I am teaching my first Camp Fulbright lesson plan to the 5th and 6th grade campers tomorrow. We are learning about emotions; I think it will be pretty cool.

July 19, 2009

I think about you all of the time because I could really use some Kara study time here in Korea. My language classes are very difficult. I am learning quickly what rote learning looks like and how hard it is on students with various learning styles. haha.

July 16, 2009

So today was a big day for me here in Korea…I failed my first Korean test! The yellow notes that I hung all over our house did not really pull through for me. With four hours of class per day we have gone from learning the alphabet to conjugating verbs in one week. We have daily quizzes with 20ish vocabulary words each and spelling counts. This is going to be interesting…

Also, thanks to my high arches I got my first blood blister from taekwondo yesterday. We had to run around our gym 20 times and do all of these funny frogger jumps over other people’s backs. 

The food here is frightening. We have octopus at lest twice a day and often it is whole. They do not try and disguise it, but instead they just add sauce. The rice usually pulls me through and the garlic makes me smell funny. I have never hated eating food so much before in my life. I have been able to have coffee. One of the guys down the hall and I bought some ground beans, a water boiler, and I have my press.

The crew here is pretty diverse, but all really nice. Our schedule is crazy with at least 7 hours of scheduled stuff on weekdays and 5ish on weekends, in addition to lesson plans, studying and weekly papers. My failing grade has put me in supervised study time this week…aka detention. We went out with some Korean college students last Friday and learned lots of funny drinking games. Annnddd I even sang norabong (karaoke)….