Sleeping Jellyfish

Classes started today. This is my last semester at AIU before I return home in August. So far my schedule consists of:

• Japanese 301
• PLS 410 – Chinese Foreign Policy
• ECN 303 – Int’l Political Economy
• IGS 200 – Intro to Global Studies

I was going to take the Cultural Background of Language course but its already full, so I’ll have to find something else to fill the gap.  Again, no class on Fridays which is nice and 9am Japanese everyday, so I should be able to get in a good routine pretty quickly. I had the option of testing into JPL 302 but it would have conflicted with two other courses that apply towards my majors, so I’ll hopefully compensate that with some extra self-study using the next textbook.

March was an odd month. The weather went through waves of warming up and cooling down, followed by snowfall and naturally the melting. The first two weeks were spent mostly sleeping. Me and Sandy would wake up sometime in the early afternoon, make dinner, and then go about our evening. We were able to go snowboarding at least a few times with our Japanese friends, and we sulked at the loss of many of the international students who were returning to their home countries. Yong Hyun is now the only Korean guy left at AIU (which I think is hard on him).

On March 11th we had a birthday party for Blaise, and on the 13th I took a night bus to Tokyo for my flight on the 14th to Seoul. I arrived in the morning and had quite a bit of time to kill so I went over to Shinjuku and met my friend Kei and ate at the same awesome Indian restaurant that I ate at last time. My flight went well, and I made a nice friend on the way over. Her name is Eun Beol, she’s from South Korea and was visiting her sister who works as a translator in Tokyo. She noticed that I was reading a Korean-Japanese-English phrasebook and asked me about it, first in Korean, then in English, and when I responded out of habit in Japanese she was pleasantly surprised. She also spoke Japanese, supposedly better than she did English, but I think she was just unconfident. So we talked about whatever for the rest of the 2 hour flight, we both had significant others abroad, we both were on the verge of graduating, we were both worried about “what comes next” and other stuff. Switching in and out of Japanese and English as needed, she helped me with my Korean pronunciation and learning useful words, not the kind of words everyone learns when first start learning a language (think of what you learned in the back of the school bus from the older kids).

Florida was great. Thanks and Congratulations to AJ’s dad and his wonderful bride Carol for hosting us and for their wonderful ceremony. It was a “beach ceremony” with just the two of them, their kids, and significant others (I was one). Carol’s boys are great guys, and made me miss Wisconsinites more than ever. I’m pretty alone over here as the only Midwesterner (except for the two new kids from St. Cloud) so it was great to have a taste of home, even though we were in Florida. Oh did I not mention that? The ceremony was in Marathon, halfway between the mainland and Key West, which is why no one saw me. It was fantastic weather and I got a bit of a tan, had some delicious freshly caught fish.

We returned to Seoul on the 21st. What occurred that day was actually quite miraculous. It was the most fluid and uncomplicated “meeting up” that ever happened. There were six separate groups that were supposed to meet in Seoul on that day, and we did, all within a matter of hours. AJ and I were actually first, and so we went to a computer to try to check Yong Hyun or Yong Tae’s phone number after I had tried to use the ones that I had already written down. We had seen that a flight from Akita was coming in an hour or so after us and suspected that it could be the one I remembered Sandy saying that he was on. And guess what!? It was!

As we started logging into the computer, AJ spotted Sandy, Michal, and Yong Hyun come out of the arrivals exit. I called out to them and we rushed down to meet them. Then the Kim’s, Yong Hyun’s parents came to meet us, followed by Yong Tae at the airport entrance. Yong Hyun’s mom (from here on “Onma”) said that Yong Tae looked like a tour guide, which is hilarious, because he is definitely the planner of the group. Nick was the last one to arrive via Incheon, so while the others took the car back to the apartment, Yong Tae and I waited for Nick and took the bus. Yong Tae got a call from Blaise saying that he would be arrived on a highway bus early that evening and asking where he should go now. Blaise had gone south from Akita to Hiroshima with another friend earlier and then had taken a ferry from Shimonoseki to Busan. Yong Tae directed him to the same subway stop that our bus would get off at and bam! Before we even crossed the street there was Blaise, suitcase in tow. Six different groups, about 2 hours and we all were able to meet. After such and amazing feat, it could have been Karma that brought the next misfortune upon us (though I received the brunt of it.) To be frankly honest, however, it was several pitchers of beer, a few unneccessary bottles of soju, a Korean named Lebowski, and an internet cafe called Monkey Town that set the circumstances for Sunday’s incident.

I love Korea

Stay tuned, stay clean.