First week back in Seoul
Originally posted on March 15th, 2014.
Many of you might wonder why I am back in Seoul. Well, to keep it short: I have been very amazed by the experiences during my 1st semester in Seoul. But as planned I returned to Hamburg during the winter vacation to see my family and friends again.
The first days here were not really as I imagined. It was nice to be back but actually really strange too. I was familiar with everything but at the same time something was different than the last time. I am living in the dormitory again with a really lovely girl from Denmark who was my room neighbor last semester. So I feel comfortable back here but still I got terribly homesick. Also the whole getting-excited-to-meet-new-people-thing is totally gone! Some feelings of regret about coming back came up and was not as open and happy as I usually am.
But after the first weekend it got better. I still trail behind my Korean class level 2. I will just blame it on the two months speaking german. 😉 But I really want to improve my Korean this semester, so I was very happy to hear that my Korean teacher would give me an extra lesson once a week. So day by day with the daily schedule I got less homesick. I am also very excited to take a class of the professor I really appreciate from last semester about International Humanitarian Assistance. Besides that the main part of this semester will be my bachelor thesis.
This time I definitely want to take more time to enjoy the life here. This includes meeting my friends, exploring more from Seoul, traveling around, hopefully also back to Japan and having more Kumdo (Kendo) training of course! I actually missed that the most when I was back in Germany. (Really! It was not the Korean food 😉)
Today I had a wonderful diner together with my friend who is from India. We wanted to try eating in the Itaewon area. Unfortunately we were so hungry when we arrived there. I should mention that today was the St. Patricks day. Why it matters although I am in Seoul? Briefly, there are some foreign events which become a big in areas of Seoul where a lot of foreigners are living resp. going out. Itaewon is one of the main areas with foreigners. So we ended up wandering around surrounded by this huge mass of people in green! Although craving for Mexican food we gave up because each of these restaurants was packed! Somehow we ended up in the My Chelsea. Which was a hilarious coincidence. Why? You will find out in one of my next posts. 😃
Funnily, our saturday night kept on continuing with more coincidences. In the end we found ourselves dancing in one of our favorite bars where I constantly bumped into all friends that I have known from last semester. Because of that I had the chance to find out that they are all experiencing basically the same strange/lonely/missing-old-friends-from-last-semester feeling as I do.
I feel really relieved since tonight.
So now I am ready and looking forward for my second and last semester of my student life!
