Let's go back to Tuesday.
Because of jet lag, I was up at 6. This was not pleasant. Oh well. I screwed around online for a while until Umma decided around 8 that we should go to the free breakfast thing and woke everyone up. Breakfasts here are fairly simple. Cereal, bread, tea, watermelon. Good stuff.
After eating, we discovered that this complex has one of those rock gardens of pain. Basically, it's just this pathway of jagged-ish rocks that you have to step on barefoot. It's apparently good for your circulation and it makes your feet feel great when you step off of them, but it pretty much like stepping on unhappiness.
They also had a balance board and other weird things for our family to play around with. It really does not take much to amuse us.
We went back to the room for a little bit and then decided to head out for epic sightseeing. Because we were up so early, we actually were out by 10. It was weird.
Our first stop was the Seodeomun Prison.
This prison was built in 1907 so the Japanese government could imprison those who resisted them when they had invaded Korea. They beat, tortured, and killed a lot of Korean patriots in there. It's an intense trip. This was actually one of our first stops when we were here a couple of years ago. Unfortunately, there was a lot of construction this time, so they had to compact a lot of the exhibits and it was hard to walk around because of all of the construction. It was still a good stop.
I don't remember this from the last time we were here, but in all of the cells this time, they had wax figures displaying various events in the prison. So, you've got people being taken into the cells, people sitting around in the cells, people being beaten in various ways, people being forced to give false confessions, tending to wounds, etc. It really made an impact. They also still had the super graphic room where you can watch people reenact the various torture methods. I refrained from watching those this time.
The other room that was still open amidst the construction was the actual execution room. Outside of that building is a tree called the Wailing Poplar tree. It was so named because of one incident where people held the tree and cried before their execution. Yeah, it was a super heavy experience.
After Seodemun, we decided to head to the Yonsei area so that we could get there by 2 for our placement exam. We took the subway to the Sinchon station and got there around noon. We found the campus and decided to eat lunch there before the exam. You know what's ridiculous? My jjajjangmyun at the student union building cost around the equivalent of $2.50. This came with soup, some bancham and a bowl of rice. $2.50 probably gets you a small burger at the Wedny's at UCI, if even that. Maybe a drink. I think it barely gets you boba. ..What I'm trying to get to is that food here in Korea is good and cheap. The way it should be.
Anyway we ate and somehow time fast forwarded to 1:45 after all of this, meaning that we had fifteen minutes before the placement exam and we had no idea where we were going. This is the way that we like to do our trips. Nothing new. We found some other student with the program and wandered around lost for a while. Asked several students who had no idea where the part of school we were looking for was. Climbed up some huge hill twice. Eventually found it, but were twenty minutes late. The test was extremely hard. There were several boxes. We had to mark our level of fluency in Reading, Writing, and Speaking. Hard. I still failed though because I couldn't decide whether my writing/reading was poor or none. We stuck around a little longer to figure out some administrative stuff. For example, we're not getting credit for class because Hastings stars when they're doing finals for the program. Sadface, but it means we don't have to worry about missing school for a DMZ tour on Tuesday (excited).
Because we made James wait about a thousand years for us to sort out that Yonsei stuff, we promised to take him to Yongsan to get some stuff for his DS. Yongsan is basically the go-to place for electronics in Seoul. There are thousands upon thousands of electronics stores in this area. It's extremely overwhelming, but it's like every nerd's fantasy. Mia, for example, was oogling over all of the cameras.
And speaking of legitimate things in this world, they had a first gen iPod on display.
Awesome, right? We got a lot of DS stuff too. I bought this Donald Duck DS stylus. It's really cute. It's in my purse somewhere right now. Haven't had time to use it. We also found this stationary store and bought some very delightfully Engrish notebooks.
We met up with Auntie Maureen and took taxis to this Italian restaurant near her apartment. It was a garlic-themed restaurant. Not nearly as intense as the Stinking Rose in terms of garlic, but it was good. Mia ordered this sweet potato and garlic pizza. I ended up stealing that from her and giving her my cheese pizza because she didn't like the honey mustard on the pizza. (this sounds gross, but the pizza was essentially a salad on bread, so it worked.)
We also stopped by Auntie Maureen's apartment. She's got an amaaazing view.
On the way back to the apartment complex, we spent about a year and a half in the subway while Umma and Hamony argued with everyone about James's nonworking subway card. I don't know why we're having so many problems with all of our subway cards this time. We had none last time. It's very silly.
Anyway, I think I worked on some OCI stuff when we got back, but that was all quite a blur.
That was about it for Tuesday. I'll end with an angsty James picture.
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