YouTube!

I joined YouTube, and I'm so socially networking... right... Well I posted some cool videos! :) Go check out my channel GreeteGoGo! :)

Here are few:


Attitude! We had to make an advertisement of ourselves to a course at the Uni.


Our locking performance! I wrote about the hiphop club Ggun in Sungkyunkwan Uni when I was in Korea. And this was our performance! :D In the beginning there are some people on the way, but they do move.


Ggun song "We can". I really like this song. I connect many good memories with it. When we had dancing practise in the club room there were singers and rappers outside practising this song and playing the music. Also outside there were people from some other club singing and playing guitar, people from the orchestra playing trumpets and violins, people playing the traditional Korean drums, and across the corridor you could hear the punk band, which I also liked, practising and always there were freshmen in the corridor playing drums. It was great!! Miss you!

Hip hop club Ggun

When I came to Korea, I wanted to get a hobby so I would have activities and something to do outside school. And in SKKU there are dozens and dozens of clubs to choose from. At first I tried out taekwondo club. It was okay, but really hard traning, which I do like, but it wasn't quite my thing. Well, later Anja asked if I wanted to go with her to a hip hop club she had found.

It was great! :) Just the fact that you have an activity where to go two times a week was really nice. But what was just awesome was that you met new people and did what I really like: dance!

Ggun.

The hip hop club is called Ggun. It consists of rappers, singers and dancers. And there are many different dancing groups: regular hip hop, locking, popping, girls' hip hop and break dance. We did regular hip hop and locking with Anja.

We danced the whole spring. And we had a performance in May. But apparently the Korean style is that you start to practise for the actual performance 2 weeks before the performance. This is true. We did just some random dance moves and small coreographies the whole spring, and 2 weeks before the performance everyone started to panic and we had practises every day. Those were very stressful times actually. I mean, we had a lot of fun in our practises, but during that time I didn't have a minute for myself. I went to school in the morning, had group meetings, more classes, and straight from those went to hip hop practise. And from that ran back to dorm to get in before the curfew. Yes, ran. And before going to bed did some school work. Because of that I didn't have much time to update my blog either...

Our locking team and late night practise.


People falling asleep...


But then came the big night! :D A concert of the whole club in our school's concert hall.

Anja watching the dress rehersal.

The atmosphere in the backstage was... I love it! You could feel the excitment in the air! People going through the performance in their heads and doing some last minute practising. And cheering before going to the stage. :)

Girls trying out their moves.

Guys doing their last minute practise.

Lockers getting dressed up.

Us in our hip hop performance outfits.

The hip hop outfits were cool, but when we saw our locking clothes for the first, okay also for the second, third,,, and probably even on the fifth time we were... shocked. Hidious. We were about to tell everyone that the performance was cancelled... But. After a while we realized that we're not ourselves on the stage, the clothes are part of the act we're doing. And when I look at this pic, I have to admit that we do look kinda cute with our pink bows. :)

Our locking team.




Our performance went well and we were so excited! After we had ran back to the backstage, we were out of breath, smiling and hugging each other. Oh, I don't want to leave Ggun!

After the performance we had dinner together. Awwaww, I'm gonna miss u! ^__^ <3

Spicy and fun, what else can you ask from the mid-term week?

It's mid-term week now and damn boring. I wouldn't want to study for the exams at all... And I really hate this Korean style of studying. A few days before the exams they move to the library, read like crazy and try to memorize, not understand or get the big picture, memorize all the small details for the exam. They might even be extremely good students and stay up studying all night before the exam. That is, probably a few hours of studying and rest of the time well spent not sleeping and getting a rest. After the multiple-choice exam they get wasted and forget everything they memorized.

This is a university. Here you shouldn't study just for the exam but for your freaking future job! Well, here it doesn't matter what you know. Your career is, roughly put, defined by which university you graduate from and who you're related to.

My style to study for the exams is to go through the stuff I've already learned in the class. And I found a really nice place to do that. Holly's Coffee, where you can choose a "grande" size, which is a BIG cup of coffee.

Well, well. Aside the studies. Yesterday we had lunch in a restaurant called "Persian Palace" that serves the most spicy food you'll find. Like ever. After choosing your dish you have to choose how spicy you want it to be. The scale is from 1 to 10 and if you wish to have number 5 or more, you have to consult the owner.

Number 2 was described very mild, number 2.2 mild and 2.5 "good choice for most foreigners". So me and Ho Yiu we went for 2.5. After that the scale doesn't go "straight" though. 2.7 is twice as spicy as 2.5, 3.0 is twice as spicy as 2.7, 3.5 is twice as spicy as 3.0 etc... Ville wanted to be bold and he ordered 2.7.

The food was spicy. I ate my chicken and rice and some of the sauce. It was burning in my mouth and my throat and it felt like even my ears were burning! That sure killed all the bacteria... But I was still okay compared to Ville. His 2.7 was truly hot. He was sweating, caughing and his nose was running. After a while also his eyes turned bit red! He said that the food was still burning in his stomach and even breathing hurt! Whatta hell, 2.7?? What are the spicier ones then?

We asked the owner if anyone had ever had number 10, and no one has. The highest anyone has eaten is number 5 by drunken Koreans. After eating that they fall down and pass out according to the owner. What a culinaristic experience!

Today we realized that on this shopping street next to our university is the coolest shop ever! If you wanna have a good time and just get to laugh, that is the place to go :) They sell all kinds of junk you can - or let me correct - can't imagine. My favourite products are: Moomin vacuum cleaner for cleaning your table or other small levels, USB hand warmer and massager, a calendar that says "Let's trip together" on the cover, a monkey sitting on a toilet seat nodding its head with solar power, a never-expiering toast you can write a love letter on and use as a wrist pillow when using computer, and many, many others. I bought from there a green, pig-shaped flashlight, that runs with manpower. You have to continuously and quickly squeeze it to generate light, that comes from its nostrils. I'm telling you, your souveniers are gonna be from that store! I'm gonna send a package home from here, because I wont be able to fit all the junk I want into my luggage. :)

Studying

As I figured at some point of the semester the balance between studying and free time activities changes and the focus moves towards studying. It is not a bad thing, after all we're exchange students. I just hope it's not gonna be all-studying-no-fun for the rest of the time. Well... I shouldn't worry. We are exchange students after all ;)

The most difficult thing when it comes to school for me right now is to get a picture about how much work the professors expect from us. The courses aren't difficult themselves, it's just that I don't know how much time to spend on the studies and assignments.

Some Korean students tend to live at the library. When you try to find a desk there you see that many desks are already "taken"; there are books and stuff on the tables waiting for the student to return. I wouldn't be surprised to see a houseplant on some desk there! You also see people sleeping with their head on their books. Of course they need a nap if they stay there all day...

One difference between Koreans westerners is the effectivesess. I wouldn't want to say that Koreans aren't effective, the infrastructure and constructions in Seoul are a proof of that. (Nothing in Finland would happen as fast as it happenes here.) The point is just that we westerners want to spend as little time on doing things as possible. If there is a decision to make in a group, we discuss it and make the decision and people compromise. If we have to do a group work, we make it as good as reasonably possible and hand it in. It doesn't have to be perfect in every aspect. I guess Koreans want to do things more carefully.

None of the styles is better than the other. The difference is how we measure time spent on the work. We westerners want to start working, do the job and get out. That is effective for us. Koreans in the other hand do a lot of other stuff like discussing alongside. So the time spent on doing the actual actions might be the same, just the style is different.

This text is really rough. I separate 'westerners' and 'Koreans' pretty arbitrarily and my arguments are subjective. It shouldn't say "westerners and Koreans" but rather "me and my impression".

Last week we represented and advertised our home university HAAGA-HELIA University of Applied Sciences to potential exchange students with Ville.

School starts

Now we have two weeks of school behind us and only now things start to be clear. There has been many kinds of problems with courses and so on. First, the cousre plan my home university wanted me to turn in last fall is completely changed because they don't offer the same courses here this spring in english. Then the school's electronic course registration system is a bit impractical so the actual registration to courses has been a bit difficult. But what bothers me most of all is that the course descriptions don't always match with the courses. So the during the first week I almost lost my faith in getting into any good courses...

Monday morning I went to this class called "Asia Business Communication". I thought it would have been dealing with topics such as Asian business culture and how communicate in it. So when I went there enthusiastic about the subject, the course turned out to be a Chinese language course. Well not quite what I was looking for...

After that I went to this class called "Marketing Mix: Channels". Everything sounded good until after the class the professor told me that half of the course is going to be taught in Korean. Not for me then...

The first week in school was kinda uncomfortable. You had no idea what the courses were gonna turn out to be and if you could even take them. Every day was struggling: trying to find courses, trying get into them and finding courses to replace those you couldn't take.

Well, after the first week things were looking better. And now after the second, I'm confident that this semester is gonna be okay :) I took: International Commerce, Marketing Mix: Advertising, Management Strategy and Understanding Korean Society. I also arranged my time table so that I don't have school on Fridays. Long weekends and weekend trips, here I come!

After the exhausting week, we went out with the exchange students to a club called Bunker. The name says it all.



Posing.

The reality.

Koh and girls.

Girls taking the dance floor!

For some reason I felt like being artistic in the bathroom. But the pic turned out to be pretty nice. Very Bunker-ish :)

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!