Tuesday August 31st

Today I finally arrived at the university at a 3-4 hour journey. The taxi was way too expensive though (20.000 won, while bus would be 1.200 won), but as it started pouring I'm glad I took it (not really, but this makes me feel better about the money). Arriving there, everything went quite smooth. I got my key, filled in some paperwork, payed whatever needed to be payed. My room was the biggest pigsty ever though, especially the bathroom and balcony. Basically I have a big room with 2 beds, ... well I don't wanna describe since I'm getting hungry. I'll show you the pictures when I get a camera, which would probably be next weekend when I will probably go back to Seoul. I hope the weather remains the same, because it has been so amazing I'd like to share that with you.

Basically our uni is a small university founded by the buddhist monks living just next to us on the hill. There is also a really famous temple nearby in the mountains from what I've heard. I might check it out one of these days. Almost everything is free, except for dormitory fee and insurance. We can play table tennis, badminton, fitness, basketball, soccer and it's all free. Karaoke room costs some money per song, but that's it and I saw people practice salmunori, so I'm going to ask Joey, the professor in charge of the international project if we might be able to join any of the club activities. I found a picture online about the surroundings, so I'll just post it here, so you can get an idea about the place I'm staying at.



As you can see, I'm at the countryside. I now understand what they meant by 'we offer you a place where you can fully concentrate on your studies'. You can since there is basically nothing around that can distract you. The 2 nearest cities being Nonsan and Daejeon are respectively 30 minutes and an hour from the university and busses drive only every hour.

Monday August 30th

Forgot what happened. I knew I had to wait for my luggage, so I couldn't get in time to Geumgang uni, but I forgot what I did during the waiting and after that.

Sunday August 29th

After having my first good sleep in days, I got out of there at about 2pm. After a nice soak in the bath of course ^^. I wish you could get this for just 8000 won in Belgium (6 euros). I got back to Ula and Martinas and we had a nice, interesting and a bit scary day. We ate Indonesian at this local restaurant in one of the alleys near, I think, dongdemun subway station (Ula correct me if i'm wrong) and had a drink at a really shabby pub. The ceiling was too low to stand half the time, but it was a great place for a pub. After that they went back to their dormitory and I went back to my sauna, since I liked that one a lot. (It took me 3 hours to find it again though, but I got to see the whole dongdemun area in the end, so that was quite interesting. Like I said, it's really worth going there. During the day, or the night, whatever you prefer, it's always nice to hang around and shop there. Shoes, clothes are quite cheap there. Not sure about the quality, but why would you care. If it breaks, you can just buy another xp.

That night, the owner kept everyone awake with his screaming though. About half an hour after I arrived, he started shouting that some guy came to this place, that spoke English and he didn't spoke English, so he didn't like it and said a lot of fuck. So I'm not if it was because of me, but when I tell people about this story, they always say, he shouted like that because he was totally embarrassed he couldn't speak English and I didn't offend him, he just felt really bad about it. He actually asked if there was some soju, so that was kinda strange, funny, but still disturbing since he kept everybody awake with his shouting ><. So this is one of the strange things I will not really understand soon (or ever) I guess.

August 28th

Arriving back in Korea, made me able to contact Korean friends again, so I met with Yura the first day. I had a nice time spending some time with her again ^^, although I was only to see her for a couple of hours. Being in Seoul with nobody where I could crash, I went out to search for a cheap place to sleep. As I explained before, the sauna's are cheap places to spend the night, but you had to sleep on the ground. But you go through situations like these to safe money :).

Yura recommended me a really famous one nearby 신용산 station, line 4 (http://www.visitkorea.or.kr/enu/SI/SI_EN_3_1_1_1.jsp?cid=610092), so when I was on my way there, I had to transfer to another line, but as I missed the last subway, I had to get out at the place I was (myeondong). Not feeling too tired at that time, I just walked around that place, which is really crowded and awake, even late at night, since it was already about midnight back then. You can see a lot of street vendors too. It's a place worth going, especially at night. After walking a couple of hours a sign caught my eye. This really small sauna was open 24 hours a day, so I thought, why not try that one then. In the end it didn't had the mixed room as I told you, it just had 3 heated pools, being 20, 30 and 40 degrees and this bigger bath, which I didn't check out, probably much hotter, a shower place, wash-up place with a tv and a small and cosy sleeping room, being about 50cm high, but it had actual beds. They were traditional, but too be honest it's quite nice to sleep on traditional beds. I didn't have trouble getting some sleep at all. There were about 12 beds at the guys room, and since this was a quite small place, only half of them were occupied, even on the saturdays. This place was nearby the exit of either the underground shopping street of euljiro 5 ga or jongno 5 ga. I forgot, but like I said, I found it by accident.

August 26th-27th

Welcome back to everybody who still reads this.
I said I was going to stop this blog, but Pie Kok is the biggest nagging son of a bitch ever, so I'm gonna continue ;)
I started writing this at september 2nd, so I'm gonna write in past tense.

Today was the day I could finally return to Korea. So after having a great farewell party with my friends, which includes receiving a ninja costume (don't ask...) I set off to the airport of Schiphol Amsterdam. After some minor troubles at the Central Train Station in Antwerp I got on the Thalys and at 15.27 arrived 54 minutes later at Amsterdam, going through security... Or did I? I got inside before my luggage was even opened and before I had to undress before all the security with their white gloves, ready to do a full body search (Security guards can be scary >_<). Nah just kidding, but somehow I got in without having to go through any baggage search. I didn't mind and was too tired to actually care. Going to the local store to spend my last euros (on some nice Belgian truffels. Nomnomnom ^^), I finally met Ula again!! I had to miss her for over a year, but it ended there with a great hug ^^. Now you'd think you're going to be able to read a happy end story, but you couldn't be more wrong. After that all the troubles started.

After waiting 2 hours, we were getting our bags ready to board the plane, but as there was something wrong with the power-control-unit they wanted to fix it before getting the plane in the air... As I was in the Netherlands I didn't expect to get inside the plane the next few hours and I was right. They said us to wait for 2 more hours. 3 hours later, we were getting quite tired of not knowing what happened so we went up to the desk to ask for more information. Apparently by then the plane had already been cancelled, they just didn't tell everyone yet, since they hadn't prepared the hotel reservations I guess, but told us 3 to go to this information desk, since that's where they would send everyone else in a couple of minutes. We were quite 'happy', because if we had been stuck behind all the korean people at the airport, we would have been waiting for like midnight... When we got at the information desk, we got a number, so we could wait at the waiting room, so we wouldn't have to stand all the time, so that was nice. Except for the fact that the queue didn't really budge at all and that they actually didn't do anything to help us at the information desk, but tell us to go somewhere else, but by this time all the korean people had already gone past us, so in the end we did have to wait until midnight...

They prepared hotel reservations for everybody, rebooked the flight, free dinner, breakfast and lunch and free calling vouchers, so we could call whoever we wanted to let them know of the late arrival (We had 2x5 minutes per person). After getting to the hotel, we had to use 1 voucher to contact the airport to ask the details of the rebooked flight. Ow wait, they were for contacting family, or was it? Sigh. Apparently KLM was so nice to put me and ula and her friend Martinas on a different flight, mine being at 6.30 am and theirs at 18.20, so again a big mess. Luckily breakfast was served at 4am, so we could just get in time to eat something and arrive at the airport in time to start complaining about the flights. Arriving at the airport they at first told us there was nothing they could do since both flights were totally overbooked as it is. I was able to convince her to change flights in the end though. She put us all on the 8.20 flight to Paris, where we had to wait a couple of hours and transfer to a direct flight to Seoul.

Arriving in Seoul on August 28th at 8am-ish, after a successful flight, we contacted our unis. I got the message that I had to arrive on monday then, since I missed the bus (which was 2 days later) and Ula and Martinas had to wait for their pickup taxi. Which again made us wait more for hours and hours, since 1 of the passengers didn't show up. In the end I got lucky here, since I could just take his place in the taxi and get a free ride to Seoul. The taxi driver was really confused about me being there and even if we tried to explain in our best Korean, we gave up and excepted the free ride. Arriving there, they settled all their uni stuff, which went okay and I left my baggage with Martinas. So after a big sleepy sigh of relieve we went for something to eat, forgetting about our troubles with some nice Korean meal <3 ^^.