rain rain go away
yesterday it rained cold cold rain all day long. in the morning, all of the korean language institute (kli) kids went to take the placement exam. so far, in the dorms, i've only met 2 other people who are in the program... everyone else has already been here for over a month taking normal classes through the university.
anyway, we all got to the auditorium where the test was supposed to take place, and it was packed with people. where the hell did they all come from? they can't be living in the dorms, as the dorms are pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else, at least by appearance. there were at least 100 people there waiting to take the test... koreans, chinese, japanese and a few europeans.
i was pretty much ready to kill on the test, thinking that they would be testing us on some vocabulary terms, months, days of the week, how to tell time, etc. the actual test turned out to be six pages long and completely on grammer. a handful of people just signed their names on the top and turned the tests in without even trying. i at least read through the questions and attempted to answer some of the questions (ex: fill in the missing particle in all the sentences... i don't know what a particle is in english, let alone in korean).
in the end, i ended up filling in some of the first two pages and then left the rest of it blank. i felt like an idiot, but they told us not to guess if we didn't know the answer, so i didn't.
then we had to go through an oral test, which was really just an interview with one of the professors. my interviewer thought it was pretty odd that i could understand her questions, but only answer them in english. she laughed a lot. is that a bad sign?
all in all, the whole thing only took about 1.5 hours and then we had the rest of the day to do nothing. so, we decided walk around sinchon in the pouring rain, which turned out to be no fun.
it's really difficult to spend any amount of time in the dorms, even when it's monsooning outside. all of the dorms in korea have these incredibly archaic rules where the boys aren't alllowed in the girl's wing and girls aren't allowed in the boys wing (if anyone is found in the opposite sexes wing, it will lead to immediate expulsion). plus, we're not allowed to have visitors spend the night. they have to leave before midnight. and we always have to sign out if we'll be spending the night somewhere else... as in writing down where we're going, who we'll be with, when and what time we'll be back. the only place people can hang out together is in the lounge, which gets really crowded, or outside, underneath a little tent that's usually filled with smokers... which is where i've been spending a lot of my time.
at the rate i'm going, i'm going to have lung cancer by the time i return to the states.
anyway, we all got to the auditorium where the test was supposed to take place, and it was packed with people. where the hell did they all come from? they can't be living in the dorms, as the dorms are pretty small and everyone pretty much knows everyone else, at least by appearance. there were at least 100 people there waiting to take the test... koreans, chinese, japanese and a few europeans.
i was pretty much ready to kill on the test, thinking that they would be testing us on some vocabulary terms, months, days of the week, how to tell time, etc. the actual test turned out to be six pages long and completely on grammer. a handful of people just signed their names on the top and turned the tests in without even trying. i at least read through the questions and attempted to answer some of the questions (ex: fill in the missing particle in all the sentences... i don't know what a particle is in english, let alone in korean).
in the end, i ended up filling in some of the first two pages and then left the rest of it blank. i felt like an idiot, but they told us not to guess if we didn't know the answer, so i didn't.
then we had to go through an oral test, which was really just an interview with one of the professors. my interviewer thought it was pretty odd that i could understand her questions, but only answer them in english. she laughed a lot. is that a bad sign?
all in all, the whole thing only took about 1.5 hours and then we had the rest of the day to do nothing. so, we decided walk around sinchon in the pouring rain, which turned out to be no fun.
it's really difficult to spend any amount of time in the dorms, even when it's monsooning outside. all of the dorms in korea have these incredibly archaic rules where the boys aren't alllowed in the girl's wing and girls aren't allowed in the boys wing (if anyone is found in the opposite sexes wing, it will lead to immediate expulsion). plus, we're not allowed to have visitors spend the night. they have to leave before midnight. and we always have to sign out if we'll be spending the night somewhere else... as in writing down where we're going, who we'll be with, when and what time we'll be back. the only place people can hang out together is in the lounge, which gets really crowded, or outside, underneath a little tent that's usually filled with smokers... which is where i've been spending a lot of my time.
at the rate i'm going, i'm going to have lung cancer by the time i return to the states.
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