I just want to begin this post by expressing how grateful I am that I was selected to be given the SLA grant which provided me the opportunity to study in Seoul. I have met such amazing people and had incomparable experiences that I would not have been able to have without this opportunity.
The final week of the program was bittersweet. On one hand I was excited to go back home, but on the other hand I did not want to leave the people I have become so close with. It is crazy how close people can get in just 6 weeks during a summer program. I was not ready to leave, especially knowing that it would be very hard to see these people again because they live across the country and around the world.
We had our final for Korean, which not gonna lie, was really hard. I was pretty confident with the listening, but the reading really got me. There were some sentences where I could not identify any of the words, which made me realized how much more work I needed to put in if I wanted to become fluent in Korean. It made me feel better when we finished our exam and the rest of the class also agreed that the final was pretty hard. I did better than I thought I would, so I am thankful for that. But I still have a long ways to go if I want to be completely comfortable in Korean. One of my classmates printed out a picture of our class and handed it out to everyone. It was really sweet.
I also made sure to eat all the foods I really liked before the end of the program. I love sweet potato pizza. This is what it looks like.
It is the perfect mix between sweet and savory and it is so good. There aren’t any places near where I live that sell sweet potato pizza, and definitely none near Notre Dame. This pizza will be deeply missed.
I also love this cheese sprinkled chicken. It’s called 뿌링클 치킨 (Bbrinkle Chicken) and it is so good. I never truly appreciated Korean chicken wings until I actually had them in Korea. There are so many different flavors and a lot of them are marinated so well. The Bbrinkle chicken also come with cheese balls, which are basically doughnut holes with cheese inside, which is also very good.
I also fell in love with Myongrong Hot Dog. It is basically a corndog with mozzarella cheese inside, but they sprinkle it with sugar. It is SO GOOD. I tried making it at home once but it wasn’t the same. There is a Myongrong hot dog in LA, but I live in NJ so it is very unlikely that I will be able to have Myongrong hot dog again until I go back to Korea, or I decide to visit LA.
Korean food will always have a special place in my heart and it will be dearly missed. Same goes for all of the amazing people I met at Yonsei.
I have definitely seen my Korean improve. I don’t get too anxious anymore whenever restaurant owners/store owners ask me a lot of questions. I don’t get anxious at all asking restaurant owners/store owners my own questions. I have become a lot more confident with my Korean typing and my Korean writing. But I definitely need to work a lot more if I want to understand newspaper articles and have a fluent conversation with an adult Korean native. My sentences are still kind of choppy, but I definitely have time and the opportunity to improve in my Korean class this upcoming fall semester.
