A Double V and Two Noughts: Proof That The Sun Actually Exists

Classes started today. In and of itself, that really isn't anything special, especially since it felt like one of those cut-and-dry history classes. But don't listen to me right now, I'm kinda cranky and need some rest. I'll be surprised if I crash now and sleep all the way through the next morning.

But in any event, the sun actually came out for the first time this entire trip! (Not that two days is saying a whole lot, but still...)

Just...take a look. Stark contrast from the day before (these were taken just outside campus)...

And, later in the day, this one taken on top of the giant staircase.

We also got our official welcome wagon today from E-dae, nothing more than just dinner at a fancy restaurant. The culinary snob in me didn't think the food was anything terribly special, although we were rather amused by one particular side dish that tasted really good. The whole time, we had no idea what it was except for the fact that "it's a root of some kind." Take a look, it's the one in the top dish.

From the top and going clockwise: the mysterious root, kimchi, seasoned sesame leaf(?), bamboo shoots, unseasoned sesame leaf

And I mistakenly dumped a spoonful of sugar meant for coffee over the ice cream they gave us, although no one's supposed to know about that...

So I said yesterday that I felt that I hadn't epically failed at speaking Korean, yet. Well, fast forward to today when I meet my grandparents, and you'll discover that any confidence I once had is (was?) now completely gone. To any casual listener (if there were casual listeners), I must've sounded like a 5-year-old with a speech impediment, speaking in sentences too broken to fix. It also doesn't help that I speak very throaty and mumbly Korean, so I sound like someone yelling in a wind tunnel on top of that.

Anyway, I'm not sure I was making any sense at all when I talked to them, yet somehow (depending on what I was talking about) I managed to get through to them on a few things and left them (and me) utterly lost on most others.

But before that...we got a short tour of campus. And while it's much hillier than anything I've ever been used to, it also (to me, anyway) looks like something straight out of a postmodern Hogwarts.