First Week

Stone bridge in the folk village

     What a week! Orientation week one is over. People keep saying time is short, and we have little time left to do things together as a group. I feel like we're only barely getting started. I feel the time crunch, too, and I am looking forward to actually teaching. It would be difficult to adequately cover the past few days, so I will just give a few thing that stood out.

   On Monday there was an optional field trip to a folk village. This was an enjoyable outing in spite of the cold. I wandered around looking at the sights, sometimes alone and sometimes with a random group of fellow TaLK scholars. Two highlights: watching the traditional music/dance performance, and swinging on the standing swings (which are fun but very tiring!)

Standing swings

Traditional farmers' music and dance

At Gyeongbuk Palace

  Tuesday was our first official day of orientation. We traveled as a group to Seoul. The welcoming ceremony, held at the main campus of Korea University, was lovely. Along with several speeches, there were performances by a children's choir, a young taekwondo demonstration team, and a percussion group similar to that which we saw at the folk village. Next we were dropped off at Gyeongbuk Palace and we divided up into our assigned teams to start our photo scavenger hunt. It was a frigid day. We all wanted to explore the city, and we had one or two side 'missions' that we wanted to do as a group, but we didn't really accomplish any. We quickly became so cold that we just wanted to hurry up and finish. We still had fun though, I think. It felt so glorious to finally get back into the bus when we were finished.

Our dorm

   Wednesday: Lectures, lectures, lectures. Most of the lectures are interesting to me, so it has been good. A notable highlight from Wednesday was the taekwondo class. This class was of course very tiring (I am STILL sore!), but also fun. I think the main thing that made it so enjoyable was simply that we were all in the same boat. Most of the people in my group had little experience when it comes to martial arts, much less taekwondo. There were many mistakes, but also much good-hearted laughter.

   On Thursday, nearly everyone I talked to commented on how sore they were. I have something else in mind to say about Thursday, but that will come in another post.

   Friday: Today was tiring again, but pleasant. The lectures were good, and we had another fun class (Traditional Korean paper craft). One highlight: lunch was wonderful! You see, some dignitary (POE director or something?) was visiting that day, so the cafeteria staff put forth an impressive spread. There was loads of fruit (we only occasional have fruit, at most once a day), delicious fried shrimp, kimbap, chips with salsa... Let's just say there was a LOT of very delighted people today at lunchtime.

   Anyway, that's the short version. Hopefully this weekend I will get a chance to write out more thoughts from this week.