What the heck, in 6 weeks I’m going home already!?
That’s the recent realization all of my exchange student friends who stay here for only one semester share. And they’re right, by then four months will already have passed! After that, there will be a big hole in the timeline of exchange studism, in which most of the concerned people will be home again and the “double-timers” who actually stay for two semesters will either travel around or also use the lenghty lecture-free period to meet their family and friends back home. As soon as they come back, they face another opportunity to meet people in the next semester of the buddy program – they however will behave differently this time, as they already know their place in their not-so-new second/third/n-th home and have established their own little network of friends. I will tell you how that feels when I get there, for now let me talk about Jeju, my first exam here and what expects me the next weeks!
The first exam…
was going okay, although I was positively surprised by its composition. In contrast to the hardly useful testing of math formula memorizations, most of the exam wanted you to name and explain concepts of self-learning neural algorithms, using some simple math here and there to further clarify those. However, asking for a term I have NEVER heard before prevented me from delivering a very good performance (was not explained/mentioned in the lecture at least…). Nevertheless, I was done with my not-so-tight exam schedule (yeah, I had only one exam!) and ready to fly to Jeju-do to get some well-earned days of rest.
Starting from thursday friday…
So I packed my stuff before the exam already and just fetched my backpack after coming home from the exam. I left home early so that I would be at the airport around 80 mins before departure.
But when I got to the airport, I didn’t see my flight on the departure table, so I looked at my phone’s confirmation SMS to look up the time – and yeah, I was at Incheon Airport, which is not Gimpo Airport.
So with around an hour to go, I ran back to the Airport express railroad and hoped that it would get me back fast enough – after all I could still check in up to 20 mins before departure. I arrived at Gimpo 22 mins before.
Running around as if I were fleeing from a swarm of angry hornets, I tried to tell the people that I want to check in for my flight – my breathless voice might have helped in them not understanding a single thing I tried to tell. After several tries at different gates and chcek-in counters, I realized that the last flights to jeju have finally departed for today. Completely energyless, I went back to the railroad express and headed home, making my 120km railroad ride of that evening a round-trip.
Back home, two things happened: I found a reasonably cheap flight for next afternoon, limiting the damage done by my stupidity. Additionally, I found out that my stupidity is greater than previously known, as I had the wrong departure time in my head and my flight went 70 minutes earlier. To give that day a sound ending, I headed to the buddy program’s thursday pub event, drank spirits while telling my airport tale and went to sing karaoke later on when the intellect of me and my companions was dimmed down enough.
Come to your point, Andy…
I am loosing focus – on friday, I caught my flight and went to Jeju. Let’s make it short: Jeju City is like any other mid-sized korean city (400k inhabitants), the coast in the city was quite pretty but the noise from the nearby departing airplanes completely ruined the atmosphere. Outside the city, most of the coast sadly was quite full of trash, mainly pieces of plastic and styrofoam. Some coastal sights were beautifully cared for, others completely abandoned. Weather on the coast (Day 1) was nice but cloudy, on Hallasan (Day 2) it completely screwed us over: Starting with 20°C and Sunshine at the bottom, it got foggy, very stormy and cold very quickly, reaching 4°C on the summit. A friend we met in the hostel however went the next day (because he had stomach problems on that day) – and had the weather we were actually expecting.
Day 3 had the best weather for me, with overall sunshine and a mild temperature. The sights I visited (A crater, a traditional village and a forest) were also very beautiful and very cared for, compared to the coasts.). All in all still a worthwhile trip!
Up next?
It gets colder, I have caught a slight cold which I hope to contain as well as I can, I have a manageable but constant stream of university stuff to do, I am enjoying time with friends realizing that most of them won’t be around for much longer: That is what the shorter-sighted part of my everyday life can be summed up to.
Practicing 8 hours this weekend for the Frisbee K-Cup in two weeks and therewith integrating myself into my frisbee team, travelling to Hong Kong next week and finding time to further learn some Korean: that is in fact the more interesting part of my next weeks here, as those activities are hinting to my broader goal of having a good second semester in Seoul aswell as travelling as much as possible. Also, I have to resconsider the planned journey to South East Asia due to the Taifoon that hit Vietnam.
So, the next time I’ll write something here (there may be no next time as my Homepage provider confronted my with some payment problems), it’ll probably be about the frisbee cup, Hong Kong, winter in Seoul and maybe some odd experiences I had during the days. See you!
EDIT: Heard the first Christmas song yesterday on the radio. I was rather annoyed than pleased by it…