First week

As I write this on Saturday, my first week in Korea is coming to an end and so far its been really great! It is really different being here a second time as I have already seen most of the famous tourist places in Seoul so I don't feel like I'm wasting time by just getting into a routine here and exploring the neighborhood restaurants and cafes. In fact, the furthest I've been away from Hongdae is about six subway stops, and that was only to visit the bookstore in that particular subway station! Other than that I've stayed in the Hongdae/Sinchon area which honestly has more than enough places to explore.
One reason I haven't left is because my internship has been keeping me really busy! Since Monday was Memorial Day in Korea, I started my internship on Tuesday and worked Wednesday and Friday as well. On normal weeks I am only going to work on Monday, Wednesday and Friday until my school starts. When classes start I am going to work every afternoon since my classes finish at 1 and by then the NSLI-Y students will be in Korea. I am going to get exponentially more busy once the students arrive, but I am still pretty busy right now- there is a lot to prepare for their program.
On Tuesday I was introduced to the office and the staff and they cleared off a desk for me to work at. The office covers lunch when I work which is really nice so every day with a co-worker I've been to a different restaurant. Tuesday I had donkatsu, Japanese fried pork cutlet, Wednesday I had mushroom, meat, and noodle stew with the intern from the year that I did NSLI-Y, and Friday I had delicious pasta with red sauce. The work I have been doing ranges from inputing things like the pronunciation of the names of the students in the spreadsheet and converting their American t-shirt sizes into Korean sizes to editing documents written in English for grammar and spelling. I am also helping with the organization of the in-country orientation so I'm in the process of planning an activity for the students to hear from alumni who are back in Korea. After work Tuesday I came home and had eggs and a peanut butter sandwich for dinner because I was too lazy and tired to do anything else and so Wednesday I resolved to never have such a sad dinner again. After work I picked up some curry croquettes, which was a great decision, and I am already scoping out other places in the area to pick up take-out food for when I know I'm going to be too lazy to cook anything that night. Thursday was my day off and I slept in and then met a fellow NSLI-Y alum who is currently going to school at Yonsei. We had bubble tea and she showed me how to get to my classes at Yonsei as well as showed me more on the Yonsei campus! Also I saw this guy:

One of my roommates is actually taking classes at Yonsei too at the same time so we will actually be able to take the bus together! After that I went and had dinner at a Hawaiian/Japanese fusion place with my roommates and a friend who was really cool. The food was interesting, one dish was soba with cream on top- it really looked like dessert not dinner but it tasted pretty spicy. We also had taco rice (basically taco salad with rice underneath) and a creamy pasta dish.

After that we went to a language exchange cafe and I practiced a lot of Korean. There weren't a lot of interesting people there that day so my friends promised we'd go again another time. Friday I worked all day and then afterwards went out in Hongdae with my roommate and her friend again! We went to a bar where a bunch of foreigners hang out so I met a lot of people! Korean style bars are designed with booths so you go with your friends and usually only talk to them, but there are a couple "foreign style" bars in Hongdae that have games like pool, fuseball, darts, etc. and are set up so people (both foreign and Korean) can talk to each other. I've seen a lot of solo travellers and foreign people working in Seoul go alone to meet people because sometimes it can be hard to make friends in a big city like Seoul without the help of a place like this.

After the bar we went and go Vietnamese food and ended up getting home at around 5:00 in the morning- it started getting light outside as we got home. This is quite normal in Seoul, since the last subway runs at midnight and the first one runs at 5:30, the peak hours for bars/clubs/late night places to eat are between 12 and 5.