Goodbye Soju, Hello Hangover

August 20-21

After dinner last night we had our first Korean language lesson. An older Korean woman taught the lesson for one hour and it was quite difficult. But, it seems as if the most important part is learning the basics. Learning the alphabet and the sounds is extremely important; then once you’ve got that down and can recognize it/produce the proper sounds, then you can go about figuring out most of the rest of the language. At the conclusion with the first lesson we were all able to say “hello, my name is ________.  I am from ______. It is nice to meet you.” So that was good. But while trying to learn this language, I kept trying to pronounce everything with the rules that I learned from Spanish…this didn’t help anything. Trying to learn this language will be more difficult for me because I still have the Spanish language speaking mindset. Goodness gracious. I really think I will buy Rosetta Stone with my first paycheck.

After our Korean lesson a pretty large group of us decided to go out and have a few drinks. There aren’t very many places where we are…there’s literally ONE street that has any kind of life on it and most of the places are little convenience stores but we found this one restaurant that served chicken and beer. The platter of chicken that was ordered was delicious and the Hite beer was a pretty good light beer. The Hite was served in the largest pitcher I have ever seen! I mean look at this…

After we had all had at least one beer, we decided to get some Soju. This was my first experience with Soju . They poured everyone a shot and of course, anyone who knows me is completely aware of the fact that I CANNOT take shots. So, I sipped it to see what it tasted like and it was like watered down vodka. Still not watered down enough for me to take it and everyone was teasing me lol. So I stuck with the beer. After we had a few pitchers at that place (it was super cheap, everyone split it and it was like 6,000 won which is like $6…pretty freakin awesome) we went a couple doors down to a sit down bar type place that was playing western music like John Legend.

This is where I found out about how awesome Soju can be. They had these pitchers of slushy drinks with Soju in them that were peach and melon flavored.  It literally tasted like a sweet slushy and you couldn’t taste the alcohol one bit. We were taking shots of that all night and that’s what really messed me up. The next morning  (this morning) I felt like death. That was one of the worst hangovers I’d ever had and what made it even worse was the fact that we were in classes from 9:00AM to 5:00PM with a lunch break in between. I wanted to sleep so bad and could think of nothing more than laying in my bed at home in the U.S. with the pillow top mattress and my familiar pillows. Today was a really rough day to get through and it seemed to last for ages! (pictures on facebook)

Most of our classes were pretty cool and one of the classes was about different places in Korea we should visit. I can’t wait to experience all of these places and festivals. There’s this Mud Festival that looks completely awesome and I will make it a point to go there even if I have to go by myself. There’s also a Cherry Blossom Festival in the spring time which would be beautiful. Some beaches were mentioned and some ancient grounds were shown so this year will be full of travels!

I’m taking it easy tonight because I just can’t stomach going out like that again tonight but a lot of my friends here are troopers and hardcore because most of them went out again tonight. You know, it’s funny because most of my friends here are from Britain and I can hear my accent/choice of words changing a bit. Like for instance, a simple sentence like “Do you watch a lot of TV?” When I typically ask a question like this, the end of the sentence is where my pitch would rise to finish the question right? Well now, since I’ve been hearing the British accent so often, the higher pitch is placed on “a lot.” It’s strange how quickly the other’s accents and way of saying things can rub off on you. My friend Gemma is from Britain and I’ve almost got her saying “awesome” on a regular basis. They also call popsicles “ice lollies.”