Non existe pas dans Korea. I mean... ANIO! ANIO 4th of July in Hanguk!
Man I suck at pretty much all languages I've studied.
Speaking of which I signed up for a language exchange site where you can meet people that want to meet in your city to practice languages. I talked to one girl who I might meet next weekend and oddly enough, met a guy today who lived just a few blocks away and we went to the park and then had dinner. He is at the level that he can read any novel but has a hard time understanding and producing words. He learned in a public school and apparently all they teach is reading and writing. He has a hard time even understanding movies in English but said I am easier to understand than most people and movies. I was talking slower for a long time but he asked me to speed it up so he could here standard native speech, he's going to school in Jersey soon. I did a bit but it still took a while. I found myself thinking carefully about how to say things using words he would understand and avoiding idioms. We did a tiny bit of Korean but plan to do more next weekend when I bring my textbook. Today we just did a list of vocab words I wanted to learn, but I have most of them in my language learning program anyway.
The park we went to was very pretty and the walkways were that squishy red kind that I noticed were part of that really long biking/running trail that I saw on Google Earth follows the river really far up north from me and south! I think in America that stuff is kind of fancy but here it seems kind of standard. Oh man and there were a lot of little dogs. Apparently in Korea they are really what most people have. Though there is a sort of infamous giant dog that we saw in Hongdae on the way to the first bar that my friends told me about. It was pretty big and furry. Maybe a small step down from some of the great danes I saw in Philly though they disagreed whole-heartedly with the possibility of great danes being bigger. Who knows.
Ok so then anyway, my new language friend and I discussed obesity when I told him I didn't like dunkin donuts (I think that he thinks I am watching my weight because he said something again along the lines of "because you are thin" when I was full at dinner). He was shocked when I told him the obesity rates in America. He was also very confused when I tried to explain online classes and the fact that they weren't cheaper than regular university classes! He also thought it was funny that I wanted to travel and work on farms and thought that westerners travel much differently than Koreans and that it was "adorable". I tried to explain that it is weird in America too but I'm not sure if he understood because I went off on a tangent trying to explain what a subculture was. We also discussed how Americans don't really learn that much about other cultures. He thought that was odd since we help South Korea so much... yea... it is.
He showed me where a sushi place near me is. Oooh dangerous. I've already eaten kimbap (Korean's version of sushi) 3 times this week (once was tonight though I finally tried something different than the first 2 rolls since he ordered for us. It was beef though, it wasn't that great). With sushi and 2 kimbap places so close I think I might start growing seaweed out of the top of my head or something. MMMMMmmmmm. Ohh that reminds me. In the 1st bar in Hongdae, they gave these little boxes that look like the kind restaurants store suger packets in, full of thin seaweed pieces and a little pale yellow dipping sauce that was salty. Odd bar snack at first but it was really good!
That was my day today. I'm glad I did something because I got pretty bummed when I didn't hear from my coteacher about going out to the park, and the other person I was supposed to meet up with had left the house before I messaged her. This not having a cell phone thing is really hindering my friend making abilities but I will have one soon I hope.
Yesterday I didn't do much. Just rented a movie and hung around alone. Wooo hoo happy 4th.
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