KOREAN SPRING

My fourth day in Beijing was another jampacked one. We started off rather late, actually, and headed over to a restaurant across the street for brunch at around noon. Again, Fangyin ordered more than necessary to make me try a bunch of things, the most exciting of which was zhajiangmian, which is supposed to be the origin of Korean jjajangmyeon. :D Restaurant name: 北平楼 Beipinglou

  Day 3 was one of my most anticipated days since I would finally be able to meet in person a friend I had met online for language exchange.  James lives in Beijing and we started talking last summer, when I had just started to learn Chinese. Obviously, back then I wasn't good enough to make conversation so we mostly spoke in English, thanks to which he says his speaking has noticeably improved! These days I can converse in Chinese a bit better, so he's reciprocating the favor superbly and I think my spoken Mandarin is slowly improving as well. Anyway, after nearly a year of texting and video chat, it seemed surreal that it would be the first time I met someone I already considered to be a rather close friend.

My second day in Beijing was on May 1st, Labor Day. It was a Sunday, so a day off for everyone nevertheless, but all the more reason for people to go out. Fangyin and I woke fairly early, and after a lazy morning left the apartment a little before ten. The subway station was quite clean, contrary to stories I'd heard about Beijing (later on I'd used several subway lines and not just Line 8, all of which were pretty similar to Seoul subway stations). We took the train to Shichahai station and walked down some old preserved street to visit a lake called Houhai (后海), which turned out to be a longer walk than I had expected.

Four agonizingly long months after I purchased my plane ticket, I finally landed at Beijing Capital Airport on the evening of April 30th. There was a two-hour delay to my flight and super long lines even after landing, so by the time I arrived at my friend Fangyin's apartment it was already dinnertime, a small disappointment as I had expected to have a whole afternoon free to explore. I was happy just to be with my friend, whom I hadn't seen since December when she moved back to Beijing after working with me in Seoul; so I didn't really mind that we weren't able to do much that day. First selfie in China! Fangyin prepared bottled drinks and a mask when she picked me up from the airport. So sweet of her! :D

Oh man, time for some major fangirling again. Last night I just finished watching a 15-episode web drama series from China, and now I have a super big crush on H u ang Jingyu (黃景瑜) , whose acting was spot on and quite sexy. Synopsis taken from Wikipedia: Ever since he was young, Bai Luo Yin (Xu Weizhou) has been living with his careless (but loving) father, Bai Han Qi, and his grandmother. When he turned 16 years old, his biological mother Jiang Yuan re-married. Her new husband is a high ranking military official, Gu Wei Ting. Because of his mother’s death, Gu Wei Ting’s son, Gu Hai (Huang Jingyu), has been harboring a deep grudge towards his father. Due to the random hand of fate, the two step-brothers with wildly conflicting emotional backgrounds have been placed in the same class at a Beijing high school, without knowing each other's background at first. With time, they slowly developed a special feeling, each in a different way. Their classmates, You Qi and Yang Meng, hav...

This is obviously not based on science or proven through experiments of any sort. It's just that I tend to fall victim to the hiccups much more often than the average person for some bizarre reason. To be honest, I haven't really tried all the popular remedies like drinking water upside down or drinking sugar water or doing the elephant thing and spinning around (is this just a Korean thing?) or getting someone to scare you; because I learned once in middle school that hiccups are actually spasms of the diaphragm, the muscle we use to breathe. So just rest the diaphragm for a while, right? My mom's remedy was to just stop breathing for as long as possible, which seemed like the best option according to my layman theory. But rather than just simply not breathing, I usually held my nose and and blew with my mouth closed until my ears popped, the thing you do on airplanes, because I just thought that would work better - it didn't work all the time but it just became a habi...

Just last week while I was chatting with a Chinese friend for language exchange, I came across the idea that maybe I could continue my undergrad education in China. It was a sudden stroke of inspiration that came about thanks to this friend's casual, almost-jokingly-mentioned suggestion, but the more I think about it the more it seems so right. The tuition is much less expensive, there are plenty of schools with linguistics programs (more than Korea anyway) and English-taught courses, admissions are relatively easier for international students, I could apply for scholarships more easily than NY, it's only about 2 hours away from Seoul by plane, and I could pick up Chinese a lot more quickly. I could finally fulfill my dream of completing my education, or at least continuing with it, something that would make me a lot happier than being stuck in an office all day (not that I actually hate my current job). Anyway, so I'm googling a bunch of schools in China, and looking thr...