School is great. I love my school. I'm busy all the time but I like it.
I have made foreign friends nearby. They don't live in my part of Seongnam, they live in fancy-pants Bundang, but it's really close. I've started attending trivia night on Wednesdays. We play in teams of five, and each person puts 5,000won in the pot. I've played three times and my team has won twice, so I've gotten 33,000 and 29,000won ($30 and $27 roughly), which is awesome. Our powerhouse trivia wizard has just left Korea though, so I'm anticipating a downturn in our stats.
For Thanksgiving, I endured a horrifically long journey to the podunk town of Hongseong back in my old province of Chungnam. It was a lot of fun and we ate mashed potatoes for breakfast the next day. I made a new Korean friend named Minjo, who is a firefighter in Hongseong. Poor Minjo is my age, but he looks kind of like he could be a high schooler. However, being a firefighter, he could probably beat me up.
I started a Korean class in November. It's two hours every Monday, and in the fourth class we took a test, which I passed!!! Now it's onward and upward to Beginner 3. My Korean is still terrible though. They're giving me the grammar skills, so I can speak in past and future tense, but I don't have hardly any vocabulary, so I don't have anything to say. Also due to time conflicts, I skipped Beginner 1, so I think I missed the present tense, which means I have trouble with it.
I did speaking tests with the first and second graders last week, and so on Thursday I composed a message entirely in Korean to ask the homeroom teachers to send me the absent students for their makeup tests. I got another teacher to correct it for me, then I typed it and sent it off and felt very special.
I'm going to Japan in January for lunar new year, then I'll be coming home February 10-25! Clear your calendars.
Today I went to my first Kpop concert, and it was incredible. Kpop is so funny because it's basically just giant corporations that start training kids at like age 11 to be Kpop stars. I went to the YG Family concert, so there were multiple artists, and they all had crossover songs and random duets and twice they covered each other's songs!
My favorite female group, 2ne1, has this song called I Am the Best, and towards the end of the concert, the male group, BigBang, did a cover of it complete with the same choreography. It was hilarious. BigBang is awesome - the leader is named G Dragon, then there's T.O.P, who is like the #2 guy. They have a song together called "High High" and it was amazing when they did it at the concert. G Dragon is this tiny little man who wears a load of makeup and looks extremely feminine, but he's massively popular, and I can see the appeal after the concert. He's just so cool! If you like Kpop, check out this link for High High.
