So far, Daejeon has been beyond anything I have expected. Everyday I am learning new things about the Korean culture and traditions and lifestyles of people in general. This city reminds me a lot of my home city in Ukraine: a majority of people live in high rise apartments like the one I used to live in and almost everything is located conveniently within walking distance. The Hannam University where we are staying has a beautiful campus with a lot of trees and a lake. Speaking of that lake, local people tell me that it is a tradition to toss people in the water on the birthday, which would sound like fun but the water is green and apparently really smelly. My birthday is in 1 week and I am staying as far away from that lake as possible. There is also an English Cafe on campus where Korean students go to Drink Tea and practice their english, since the cafe has an english only policy and is equipped with english boardgames, books, as well as english tv channels. That place can serve as our 'time out' from the Korean surroundings, but I doubt that we will ever get sick of Korea. A short walking distance from the dorms, you would find busy streets with tons of fun places like restaurants, bakeries, pool halls, A batting cage, bars, clubs, cafes, etc.... Tonight Josh and I had to fend for ourselves for once and find something to do, so we checked out a Waffle cafe where we ran into Dr. Kim, which failed our mission of independent exploration. But we managed to order some delicious cappuccino waffles on our own, which we pretty much inhaled since they were so so so good.
After that, we headed over to the Billiards lounge to play some pool. I think I managed to surprise both Josh and myself with my lucky shots! The streets in Daejeon are fully illuminated at night with signs and advertisements. The light displays are really bright and are always exciting to look at. Our curfew is 11 p.m. or 12 am if we are late, which is somewhat limiting, because if I could, I would stay out in those lights all night!
We also found some interesting things on the streets such as a Lobster game where you can try to catch a lobster out of a box with an automated claw...and a block over, we stopped by another stand where Josh bought game tickets to see if he could win a Bunny or other fun things.
Josh didn't end up winning anything, and Emily, Dr Kim's daughter had to be our translator everywhere we went. All we could do when surrounded by Korean speaking people was just mimic what they were saying and try to understand what the words/sounds meant. I don't think that people appreciate it that much, but they just laugh at us because we sound so silly. We are slowly starting to catch on to dialogues now, and hopefully we will leave Korea with some basic language skills. I have much more to blog about, and a lot of things to catch up on, but I 'll blog about one thing at a time. I hope you guys have enjoyed following our trip thus far! We sure have :) Catch you later.
Nadia
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