Melgarber’s Weblog

Sorry it has taken me so long for this blog to go up. I have been incredibly busy.. running around doing stuff… etc… but here is my snowboarding trip…

My mind has been going crazy over this snowboarding trip. To pass the time Carl and I went to an arcade, where I got rocked… the joysticks sucked and i still got owned… it was the worst display of king of fighters I ever given…(and i was so ready to win)

So… the snowboarding trip finally came last Wednesday. It was pretty much our first real activity (besides the dinner with Sylvia and James). We met up at the train station, but sadly it was only me and Lucas. No one else could come. We took Sylvia’s car on the one and a half trek to Jisan Forest Resort. When we got there, I was surprised to find that they had shoes my size.

The Resort was beautiful. There were about 7 or 8 slopes ranging in all difficulties. But unfortunately we could not hit the slopes till 12:30 because thats when we were allowed on the ski lifts (which were amazing btw… they had a conveyor belt for you to stand on and you get swept away).

After we were able to get on the slopes i discovered that Lucas is severely better than most of the people here (being from Austria and all). He went down the semi-noob slope with me a few times and then jumped to the crazy hard ones and zoomed down those by himself…

So as I was going down the mountain by myself a 12 year old girl thought it would be a good idea to cut in front of me. Because I was terrible at turning i was going at about a bazillion miles an hour (I’m not sure if thats how you spell that number) but it left me with two choices… I could barrel into this girl and later inform her family that she was killed, or I could take the a hard hit to the ground and save her life… Because I didn’t know enough Korean to tell a mother her daughter became road kill (and sound sad and sincere) i chose to take the fall. I crashed into the snow at an alarming speed… My face ate the floor as if it was made of candy and so did my hip which messed up my leg for the whole time I was there…. But this was a free snowboarding trip so I had to keep going…

All in all it was a fantastic trip, and Lucas and I became better friends because of it. I also got 100% used to all stares from Korean people haha, usually i get stares anyway because how many black people do you see in Korea… (well there are only a few in Seoul but not enough to say there are an abundance)… But at this mountain everyone was super shocked to see me, and I don’t know if it was a good thing or bad… I like to give them the benefit of the doubt and say that I opened their horizons but… i dunno hahah ill just leave it at that.

Jan 30th – Feb 3rd

It all pretty much started with me at bloomfield saying bye to Geornyce (aka. Gege… and other people) but mostly Gege for I will miss her the most… So yea I drive home… pack my things (last minute… yea yea… I know…) and then wait till 3 AM… Yay… staying up late rocks. I get to the airport and meet up with Carl where we jump on a plane to Atlanta Georgia… then on our 13 hr flight to Seoul. I would like to point out that on this flight my TV screen got messed up about two and a half hours into the flight. So i was able to watch one chris rock comedy special and half of superbad… the rest was just a long uncomfortable nap and 2 hrs of laptop power. All in all one of my worst airplane flights. We land in Incheon airport and get picked up by this taxi guy. We drive for about 30 minutes and end up in our host family’s house. Its a big apartment that was lovely. The husband of the family flew private jets for samsung and the wife I think played golf professionally… Moving on, the girl in charge of all of our foreign affairs, housing, student activities, etc is this very nice but ditsy woman named Sylvia. After a long conversation with the host family Slyvia takes Carl and I outside and tells us we have to leave the house in about 2 days… which is fantastic because we just loved lugging around our heavy luggage. So we couldn’t get to comfortable… which was hard because the beds were so incredible. After that Slyvia took us to see where the school is (after taking us on the wrong train). To make amends she took us to dinner. I then went to sleep at about 7ish…. only to wake up at 2am… and slept no more…
The next day kinda just merged into existence because I was up since 2 The most brilliant thing about the lady of the house was the fantastical homemade breakfasts. They were so good… Too bad she was afraid of me… At around 8 we left for class. Once we arrived there we had to take our placement tests. We came to the realization that we were too advanced for level 1 but not advanced enough for level 2… so they threw us in level 1. This is the second time we have to learn the alphabet -_-‘ oh well…

Our teacher is brilliant. Even though she acts like shes teaching a kindergarten, it works, because most of the people in the this class dont really know any korean at all. Class ended and carl and I decided to wonder around Seoul alot, and look for the hotel we stayed at last time we were in korea. While looking for it we saw a multitude of other things that were photo worthy, but alas I didn’t have a camera. So we went to this camera store and I attempted to buy this camera that was about 350 bucks, only to find out my debit card didn’t work because bank of america sucks … So whatever we left the place and looked around (but i will not let that damned camera defeat me).The next day we went to class and headed straight to the host family to leave for our new dorm. We were quite excited because we were gonna get free internet, free breakfast, free laundry, our own bathroom, etc. We drove in a taxi for about an hour, and got to our so called super awesome dorm…

By the way we looked at a map of seoul and the driver decided to take the longest route possible to get to our dorm. It was a tiresome drive. After we got there we had to meet two other students. One was from our class whose name is Lucas, and the other guy was a brit named james. He’s been here only 3 months and his korean is awesome, but then again he is in a much more intensive course than we are. James decided to take on the challenge of eating a live baby octopus which is apparently something they do over here in korea. I haven’t met any koreans that would do it though, but James will. We should be seeing that next week maybe.
The weekend rolled on by and carl and i went to this techno mall place, which was just a big mall of electronics, nothing to special. I also tried to get my camera again… and for a second time my debit card failed me. But i was determined not to let that camera win. Sunday came about and we explored seoul a little more.

We went to an imax theater, in Yongsan… BUT by this time we had the camera so screw you debit card. To bad it was kind of cloudy. The other days where I didn’t have it, had beautiful sunny skys (even though it was still freezing). The Imax place also pretty much a giant electronic mall with nice stores and clothes, etc