Orientation day

Yesterday there was an orientation day for exchange students in SKKU. It was the first time I saw all the other exchange students. It's funny that there are so many Finns here. I guess there are like 10 exchange students from Finland, maybe eight from France and also many from China. Other nationalities are i.a. Dutch, German, Swedish, Russian, Japanese, Taiwanese and even Kazakhstan. All together there are about 50 exchange students here.

Hosts.

Hanging around at the break.

Yay, here we all are :)

At the orientation day they served us Korean food for lunch. We had the most popular Korean dish, kimchi and bibimbap.


Bibimbap = mixed rice. It's always served beautifully set but you just mix the whole thing and eat it with a spoon.

In the afternoon we had a tour around the campus. Back at home my university is just a building. So compared to that this campus is huge.

Our tour guide Marek.

In the library. What is this, a cyber cafe?

There is also a baseball field.

In the central library building I found an interesting thing.

What do you see in this picture? A piece of paper, right. And behind that is a water purifier.

But the piece of paper is actually a pocket. It's a water cup! Wow!

Anyway, about the orientation day. On our campus tour we also got to see Sungkyunkwan University's old campus. SKKU is the oldest university in Korea and the old campus is over 600 years old.

In the largest area on the map is actually a shrine for the confucianists and buildings to support the celebrations held there. In the smaller area on the up-right are the actual classrooms and dorms.

Here you can see the new campus buildings behind the old campus.

Walking up to the shrine. In order to honour the ancestors you can't just run up the stairs. You have to take a step, have your both feet on the same step, pause for a second and then take an other one.







On the 1000 won bill there is a picture of the old campus. The picture is a little blurry so you can't really see it but it's there. :P

Us in front of the Central library.

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In the evening all the exchange students went out together.

We walked through the campus and it looked really nice in the night.

On the street we saw like the most random thing: Marimekko curtains in a street restaurant!

We went to a norebang = karaoke room. It was fun :)
In Finland we also have karaoke bars, but there it's more like performing because you sing in front of everyone in the bar. Here there are small rooms that you rent for your group. You don't really perform to the group, people sing along and shake tambourines. There's actually a lot more going on in the room than just singing.




Norebang!