Culture Camp!

NSLI-Y/I-EARN/YES organizes a ton of events for us scholarship recipients. Last Saturday we participated in a "Culture Camp", where we met with YES and I-EARN, and fifty Korean high school students. We were split up into our supporter groups, and given missions to complete, some at the hostel that hosted us, but most took place at various locations around Seoul! First our group had to memorize part of the lyrics to a kpop song and perform it accurately in front of everybody. This was easy for the Korean high schoolers in our group, but for us Americans? Not so much, haha. Each group had a different song snippet and had to go sing in front of the judges, who would decide whether or not they were accurate enough to move on to the next round. It took my group...three tries ...to pass. Yeah, we were last. After stumbling through the lyrics for the third tine, we were allowed to move on to the next round, where we were given various clues that, if I described them, would bore you to death. We eventually figured out we had to take the subway to Changdeokgung Palace, which celebrated early Korean traditional culture and archtecture. It was a beautiful park! Once there, we met Joe, a YES coordinator, who gave us our "missions" where we had to find golden dragons and secret passageways and whatnot. Then we grabbed some Japanese food for lunch and headed off for our next mission at Cheongyecheon, a river that runs right through the middle of Seoul, a sliver of nature and relaxation in the modern hustle and bustle of Seoul. We met Taesung there, and our missions involved finding clues/information posted along the river's length. Since the river's about 5 miles long, we definetly got our exercise in! After finishing our missions there, we headed back to the hostel, where the entire group had a quiz over what we were...uh, SUPPOSED to learn that day, but of course none of us remembered, not even the Korean students! But thanks to some lucky guesses, our group managed to come up in third place, and only five small points shy of a tie with second place! We chatted for a bit, an then headed hone after a long day. I had an awesome time, and it was great to interact with Koreans my age! We become Facebook friends, so hopefully we'll keep in touch.

I wish I could blog more often! But I've just been totally consumed by my language classes and program meetings and my host family. But I've been having a blast, so I'm not going to sacrifice my precious time left by spending it all on the computer. But I can easily write up a post or two on my hour-long commute to school, so if anyone out there has a suggestion for a blog post, let me know! :)

And now for picture spam, haha. I wish I could organize everything better, but I'm blogging everything from my smartphone (we're not allowed to bring laptops on my program, but smartphones/tablets are okay), please bear with me! :)