Eolgul

This post is about my face. I have to warn you, my face is pretty disgusting. If you are at all squeamish (for example, if you don't like to see close-up images of pus), you may want to skip this particular post. You can go instead directly to the other new post of the day, here. It's about yogurt and it's not in the least bit disgusting (unless, perhaps, you are French).

I'm starting off the post with an inoffensive picture so that you won't have to see anything gross unless you deliberately scroll down to read further.

This is what carrots look like in Korea. They are shorter and fatter than the commonly seen American varieties, and they come covered in dirt, to remind you that they really did come out of the ground.


Okay, if you've made it past the carrot picture, you proceed at your own risk. March 6, I notice these weird pimple-like things with little white pus-filled bumps on them, clustered under my lower lip. A day earlier there were some above my upper lip; you can make out the remnants if you look closely.


March 10. The pimple-like things have spread out toward my cheeks, and become larger.


In addition, there is noticeable swelling in my right cheek, underneath one of the bigger bumps. I look like the mirror image of John McCain.


After consulting with a Seattle doctor by email, I begin applying a topical antibiotic. He thinks it's possible that these are not pimples but a perioral dermatitis caused by bacteria. By yesterday morning, the 11th, things are looking a bit better. Even so, the swelling on my right cheek is kind of hard and painful. There's something nasty in there.


After dinner last night, I felt a liquidy tingle, and looked in the mirror. All that chewing must have forced some of the gunk out from the swollen area.


By the way, in the above picture you can see, if you look carefully, the small bald spot in my left eyebrow, the result of an infection I had there a few weeks before coming here.

I know you want to see a closeup of all that pus oozing out. Here it is.


I took this picture a few minutes ago:


The swelling is much reduced since all that stuff came out last night. But some small, new pustules are forming. It's not clear if I'm on the mend or not. If things get noticeably worse, I'll see a doctor here. The Seattle doctor said to wait 5-7 days to see if the topical antibiotic is helping.

What's that? You couldn't really make out the bald spot in my eyebrow in the earlier picture? Okay, here's a better picture of it:

Yogeureut

It seems that in Korea, as in the US, French language and culture carry similar cultural signals, signifying refinement and elegance. As a result, the Koreans are as guilty as Americans of using pseudo-French to make products seem fancier.

Today on the way to class they were giving away free samples of a new product on the street, right where long lines of SNU students were waiting to get on shuttle buses from the subway station to campus. I got one, and took it out during a class break to eat. Here's what it looked like:


Underneath the silhouette of the thin French maid, hurrying to bring you your yogurt cup on a covered silver tray, it says "European Premium Dessert: Dértte 데르뜨 [Dereutteu] 트위스떼 [Teuwiseutte]". What is Teuwiseutte, written in flowing script? Take a look at the front of the product.

Aha, it's "Twisté"! Notice how the yogurt and strawberry jam are twisted in the cup?

I have to say, it was pretty delicious.

Tishyu

Small portable packages of facial tissues are everywhere in Korea. Kiosks in subway stations, bus terminals, and on the street sell them, as do convenience stores. And unlike in the US, where there are only two or three national brands (Kleenex being the best known) and some generics, there seems to be a nearly infinite variety of tissue brands here (presumably made by multiple manufacturers).

In my experience most cultural traits either have an underlying rationale or can be explained as an historical contingency that has outlived its original motivation and been transformed into a cultural trait. I suspect that the reason Koreans buy and carry so many tissues is a holdover from the days when public restrooms had no toilet paper. If you were anywhere outside of your own home -- whether at a restaurant, classroom, museum, what have you -- and had to use the toilet, you needed to have some tissues with you. So it made sense that tissues were sold everywhere, and were often given away as business promotions or advertisements.

Toilet paper is pretty much everywhere in Korea now. Toilet paper in public bathrooms is a good diagnostic for how developed a country is, I think. When the economy is sufficiently developed that institutions can afford to give toilet paper away for free, and when it's worth so little that patrons won't steal rolls from public bathrooms to bring home, you can tell the country has moved out of "developing" status.

But people here in Korea still carry tissues, and they are still available everywhere.

Here are some pictures of a tissue pack that I really found amusing. The structure is fairly typical; a folded plastic container containing two tissue pockets.

Front:


Back:


One of the inside flaps when unfolded open:


But I still can't figure out why Koreans use metal bowls and cups to hold burning hot liquids. Can anybody explain this?

Woldeu Bil

My living situation this time around in Seoul is not nearly as luxurious as it was in the fall, when Erma and I were living in a fancy officetel. This time I'm living in an off-campus student dorm. But I'm pretty comfortable here. One reason is that I still have many of the useful objects Erma and I accumulated over the course of the autumn. Some of those were given by relatives, some were loaned from Erma's parents, and some we purchased. These things range from pots and pans to power strips to bedding to toiletries. We were able to store all of these things at Erma's parents' place over the winter, and they very kindly drove them up to Seoul when I arrived. Erma's mother also provided me with banchan (side dishes, described here) like kimchi and myeolchi (멸치, little anchovies) and some other basic foodstuffs.

But I get ahead of myself.

I arrived at Incheon Airport on February 25, too late at night to get into the city and move into my dorm room, so I spent the night at an airport hotel. The next morning I took a bus into the city. The airport bus system here is really good. There are numerous "limousine" bus lines that connect the airport with different locations in and around Seoul. They run frequently, are very comfortable, and don't cost too much -- under $10. One of them (the number 603, if you're curious) goes straight to SNU. This is what it looked like from my seat in the back row:


The TV at the front was receiving satellite broadcasts.

I got off the bus and took a short cab ride to my dorm building, which is called World Ville (월드빌 Woldeu Bil). I had an address, but as you know from this earlier post, an address isn't much use. Fortunately, I had prepared for the cab ride by printing out a map showing the location of the building. The cab driver studied it for a while and then got me there with little difficulty.

It was a little after noon. I had two heavy suitcases and a backpack, and I was standing in front of this building:

See the little set of glass doors on the left? Outside the doors there was an intercom. One button showed a stylized image of a man's head wearing an official-looking cap, labeled gyeongbi 경비, which means guard. At the old officetel, there was a guard on duty 24 hours a day. I figured I'd buzz this guy, he'd let me in, look up my name on a list of new students moving in, and give me keys.

But every time I tried the button, the little LED screen said "EROR", which I took to mean "error". I spent about ten minutes trying this, pushing different combinations of buttons, and then trying again, even though it never worked. I peered in through the glass doors, and there was nothing to see but a narrow stairway and an elevator. I looked in the first-floor windows to the right of the door, but the room didn't look like an office, and it was dark and apparently unoccupied.

So, I thought for a minute about what I should do. The SNU language school had told me what room number I was in. Then I had told them what day I was moving in, and they had acknowledged that information. They hadn't said anything about HOW I should move in, and I had just assumed that there would be an official person on site when I arrived.

It seemed that the next thing I should do is call the language school office. But I wasn't sure I had the number. I had carefully printed up sheets with all the information I thought I would need when I arrived in Korea: the airport hotel phone number and location, the World Ville location, instructions for how to take a local bus to campus, etc. But I didn't have the language school phone number. Probably, though, it was somewhere on my computer, maybe in the signature of the emails that I'd received from the school.

I was just about to take out my computer when a young woman approached the door with a card key. She looked like a student; I asked her in Korean if there was a guard somewhere. She didn't understand at first, but seeing my suitcases, she asked if I was a new student. I said I was, and I was moving in. "You don't have keys?" she asked, surprised. I said I didn't. Did I need to go to campus to get them? "No," she said. She told me to wait and she'd get help. Then she went inside.

A few minutes later she came back out with another student, a friend of hers. Both of them were Japanese, and their Korean was not much better than mine. The second student gave me the phone number of a person to call. I tried it, but there was no answer. They decided I'd best come inside -- it was cold out, snow on the ground -- and then we'd figure out what to do. So I took my luggage in and got invited to one of their rooms. The first student I'd met was named M-, and the second R-. R- found the phone number of the school, and I called. They said they would get in touch with the person who had the keys, and would get back to me. A few minutes later they called back to say that the person with the keys would come by at 2:00. I looked at my watch: 12:45. "It's okay," said the students, "we have nothing to do today. You can wait here until 2:00."

So we spent an hour chatting in Korean in M-'s place. I thought: this is great. I'm already making friends in the dorm. When I asked how living here was, I got two warnings from the students: one, that their rooms had been filthy when they'd moved in; two, that the guy coming with my keys, who was sort of the resident proctor, wasn't very responsive and that it was hard to get problems in the dorm addressed in a timely fashion. Moreover, none of the dorm rules were actually enforced.

When 2:00 came around, I went downstairs to wait, and a few minutes later a young guy showed up. He apologized that my room hadn't been cleaned yet. We went in together, and he spent a short time sweeping the floor and scrubbing at the kitchen counter. That's when Erma's parents showed up with all the stuff they had driven up from their home, and the guy who had been cleaning my apartment disappeared when I went down to greet the in-laws.

After we moved everything into the apartment, Erma's parents took me on a quick tour of campus, which was a mob scene -- it was graduation day. Students in graduation robes were posing with their parents, holding flowers. The campus roads were jammed solid. We crawled through campus, locating my language school building. Then they dropped me back off at the dorm so I could work on getting settled.

Indeed, as I'd been warned, the place was filthy. I probably spent a total of 15 hours cleaning. The previous inhabitant had left a number of things behind, a few of them useful (like laundry detergent) and most of them not (like bathroom slippers, lots of notes written in Russian, and plastic silverware).

The most surprising thing I found when cleaning was under the bed. I don't think anyone had cleaned under there in 5 years. I was poking under there with a swiffer, bringing out huge clods of dust, when I hit something big. If I had been fishing I would have been excited. I leaned over and looked down, but I couldn't make out what it was until I'd slid it out into the center of the room.


A tire! A tire! I still don't understand how there could be a tire under the bed.

The biggest problem was the bathroom. The floor was covered in a disgusting, thick oily layer of scum, hair, and god-knows what else. Like all Korean bathrooms, there was a drain in the middle of the floor, but it was almost completely clogged. Similarly, I discovered that the bathroom sink drain was almost completely clogged. Without a working drain, I couldn't clean in there.

Fortunately, the next day I left with Erma's parents for their home in the south. While I was there I sent a series of text messages to the guy who had let me in, and he managed to get the drains unclogged, so that when I returned I was finally able to scrub the bathroom clean.

I waited to take pictures of the place until it was clean and all my belongings were unpacked and put away.

This is what the staircase and elevator look like. It looks pretty fancy, no? Marble walls and all.


This is my door: Room 404. The hallway continues around to the left, where there are three more apartments. That's a total of five per floor. I think there are 25 residents.


When you open the door, this is what you see. There's no place to store my suitcase, so it just has to sit there. I put up a decoration to relieve the monotony of the white walls. That metal thing is a rack for drying clothes. Note too the small space in the entryway for leaving shoes. One reason the floor is elevated is to make room for the pipes that circulate hot water for heat.


Turning to the right once inside the door, you can basically see the whole place:


The fanciness of the hallway is not carried through to the inside. The floor looks like wood. But it's not. It's not even fake plastic wood. It's a wood-colored vinyl lining. And it's buckling up in places.

Looking back from the other direction:


This seems pretty neat until you look down. I've got the second suitcase and the laundry basket, as well as trash and recycling, behind the headboard of the bed.


Here's my desk and bookshelf. That's a big map of Seoul on the wall.


The space is small, so it's not surprising that there isn't much storage, but it's still amazing how inefficiently laid out and furnished the place is. For example, there are no drawers in the entire place. Not in the desk, not in the kitchen counter, not in the closet. That thing that looks like a drawer is in fact ... well, I'm not sure what it is. But I decided to put my computer on it, since the desk is too high for comfortable typing. That works pretty well, since it keeps the desk clear for books and such. The disadvantage is that when I move the chair behind the computer, it bangs into the box that I'm using as a nightstand.


The closet works fine as long as you can hang most of your clothes. I've stored boxes above the closet.

My underwear and socks are underneath the television.

The kitchen has a single electric rangetop. There's a clothes-washing machine underneath it. This area is also terribly designed. There are no drawers for silverware, knives, spatulas, etc. The cabinets are arranged in such a way that when the cabinet door is open, it's in the way of where you need to stand--right in front of the sink--in order to reach into the cabinet.


There's no place for a refrigerator, so the small fridge they supplied sits awkwardly between the kitchen and the living area. You can see it in the first picture of the room above, with the microwave on top of it. It was originally facing the bed, which seemed really silly, so I rotated it to make it more accessible from the kitchen.

Here's the bathroom:

Those things on top of the toilet tank were left by the previous resident. Since there is conditioner and moisturizing body wash, I'm assuming it was a woman.

The biggest surprise is that there is no separate shower stall. The showerhead is attached to the sink, and the entire bathroom is the stall. I've seen lots of bathrooms like this in China, and I suppose they are probably not that uncommon in small apartments in Korea.

It's a slight hassle, but not too bad. Mostly it's a matter of training myself with a few simple habits. Before showering, take the towel and the bathmat out of the bathroom. After showering, don't forget to change the diverter so the water comes back out the sink faucet. (I have twice now, after showering, dressed and gone back in to brush my teeth, only to give myself a second shower.)


There isn't much room in the bathroom. The door swings in, with about an 8-inch clearance in front of the sink and a 4-inch clearance in front of the toilet. This means to open or close the door while in the bathroom, you either have to smush one skinny thigh up against the sink and scrape the door past it, or straddle the toilet.

The toilet itself is set right up against this corner jutting out from the wall.

Basically, it prevents your left leg from going where it would normally go when sitting on the toilet. So you have to sit side-saddle.

My suspicion is that this whole building was once as fancy as the halls, with big rooms, and that at some point those rooms got divided up. The light in the bathroom gets its power through the shared wall with the kitchen, suggesting that the bathroom was divided off some time after the building was constructed.

I still don't understand why there aren't more windows. The window over the sink looks out over the street, though you can't actually see out of it. Then there is a tiny window in the bathroom, which is too high to see out of. I would have thought there would also be a big window over the desk, where I've got the map of Seoul. That's an outside wall.

So I went out to look. The arrow points to the bathroom window of my room on the fourth floor.

Quite odd! There is a large window on the third floor, but on my floor there is just a wall, and a mysterious railing, as if there were a balcony there.

I don't mean to complain too much about the place. It's reasonably comfortable, and certainly acceptable for a three-month stay. The oddities and annoyances can be worked around, and I'm able to study effectively.

My main disappointment is that it seems really hard to meet people here. One reason I wanted to live in the dorm was to have a social experience with other international students. But the place is structured in such a way as to prevent that from happening. There are no common spaces at all, and the hallways are so narrow that you can't leave a door open with blocking access. That means that when residents are at home, their doors are closed. Occasionally I meet someone going in or out, but there's no place to stop and chat.

Well, it's still early -- I've only been here a bit more than a week. We'll see how things play out.

By the way -- for those who have been waiting with baited breath for the explanation of the mystery photos I put up a few posts ago, I've now posted it in the comments section.

Haeinsa

Last week, before school started, Erma's mother took me to Haeinsa (해인사 海印寺), one of the most famous and treasured Buddhist temples in Korea. It is most famous for housing the Tripitaka Koreana, about more which later.

The temple is about a three-hour's drive from Erma's parents house. Or at least it should be. But for the first time on any road trip in Korea, there was no traffic at all, and we made it in a little over two hours in each direction.

The temple is nestled in the Gaya Mountains (가야산). The approach to the temple is beautiful.




I'll present several pictures without comment.








Our 8-year-old trusty 1 megapixel Nikon Coolpix camera was fatally damaged when I fell ice skating in December with it hanging from my shoulder. This forced us to purchase a new camera, which has features. I tested out the panoramic functionality for the first time. (You'll want to click to see a larger version to get the full effect.)


Here I am inside one of the four temple buildings housing the Tripitaka Koreana (an odd hybrid Sanskrit-Latinate name), which is a complete set of the Buddhist canon, in Chinese, carved into over 81,000 wooden printing blocks. It has survived the ravages of war and the environment since its creation in the 12th century, and is still in good enough shape to be used for printing. In addition to being a living object of devotion for Buddhist practice, its historical and academic value can't be underestimated.

The amount of care and labor that went into its creation and preservation is astonishing to contemplate. Although the interior of the buildings is off-limits to visitors, and flash photography isn't allowed, I was able to stabilize the camera against the window beams and get some reasonably good interior shots. You can see the wooden pages of the canon, stacked two rows deep, shelf after shelf after shelf of them.




The characters were, of course, all carved backwards and in relief into the wood.


The buildings that house the blocks don't look like anything special.


The fact that they date to at least the mid-15th century, and survived fires that seriously damaged other parts of the temple, isn't in and of itself that remarkable. That they and their contents were saved from being destroyed during the Korean War when a Korean pilot repeatedly disobeyed orders to bomb the site is remarkable, but says nothing about the quality of the buildings themselves. (There is a memorial plaque to this pilot located outside the temple.)

But despite appearances, the buildings are scientific marvels.

Something about the foundation, structure, and materials of the buildings maintains optimal humidity conditions for preserving the woodblocks. Notice that the upper-level windows are smaller than the lower-level windows. On the other side of the building this pattern is reversed. Somehow this creates optimal airflow. Somehow the builders knew that it would do so.

Because of the importance of the buildings to the preservation of the Tripitaka, they are designated as a Korean National Treasure and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

You can read more about both the temple and the Tripitaka, if you are interested, at the Wikipedia sites here and here.

I can't resist ending the post with another multilingual pun. We saw this truck on the road to Haeinsa:


It's a Seoul Milk truck. On the left side it says "I heart 乳". The fact that the word "LOVE" is written inside the heart makes it clear that this sentence is meant to be read in English. The Chinese character at the end is, in Korean, pronounced yu (like English 'you'), giving us the sentence "I love you", familiar to every Korean over the age of 2. The character means 'milk', so the sentence is also understandable as meaning "I love milk".

And, just in case the Korean reader doesn't know the character (especially likely if the target audience is children), the pronunciation is provided, visible to those with sharp eyesight, in parenthesized hangeul letters 유, as you can see in this closeup:

Hangungmal Sueop (redux)

Today was my second day of class, and since yesterday was primarily a review class, today was the first taste of what the term will be like. I thought that the pedagogy was far superior to that of Yonsei's language institute, which I described in an earlier post.

Although our building is older than the Yonsei classroom building, the facilities in the classroom are better. I took this picture after class today:


Hanging on the wall on the left is a map of Korea. You can see hanging from the desks in front of it the Korean names of the students who sit there. There's a computer in the teacher's desk, with a monitor for her to look at, and it's hooked up to powerful speakers and the digital projector hanging from the ceiling. Our listening comprehension exercises are played over the speakers, loud and clear. In the TV cabinet are all kinds of teaching aids, including nicely laminated plastic strips with vocabulary words written on them, and big colorful magnets for posting them up on the board.

Unlike at Yonsei, the teachers used props to good effect -- holding up pictures to illustrate grammar and vocabulary and to elicit meaningful sentences from the students. It was also more interactive -- we were all invited to create and speak sentences on the spot using the grammar patterns we were learning.

On the whole it seems like a better environment for improving speaking and listening. (My listening is still terrible. I had a hard time with the exercise we did in class.) So I'm feeling pretty optimistic about my chances to make good progress this quarter.

I learned three interesting things from the teacher today:

1) It is illegal for doctors to tell expectant mothers the sex of the baby before the 8th month of pregnancy. Apparently this is because in the past it was common to abort girls.

2) The reason there are no trash cans in the subway stations (and very few on the streets) is that after Korea sent troops to fight alongside the US in Iraq, the government feared that terrorists might try to plant bombs in the trash cans, so they were all removed.

3) I'll tell you about the third interesting thing in a future post when I describe my neighborhood.

Today during lunch a big snow flurry suddenly started up. For about an hour it snowed big fat flakes, lending a festive atmosphere to campus. Temperatures have hovered around freezing since I arrived.

This is a picture of the main library, taken from the Student Union building. If you click to enlarge it you can see the falling snow.


In the afternoon I met with a linguistics professor who specializes in early Korean writing. He doesn't really speak English, so we had to communicate in Chinese, which really stretched me. He invited me to participate in a weekly philology seminar he is running this quarter with five advanced graduate students; they are going to work through an ancient Korean manuscript written in Chinese characters. It's not clear yet how much I'll be able to understand in a Korean-speaking advanced class, but it should be an interesting experience.

Iphak

Today was the first day of classes at my new language school at Seoul National University. SNU is the flagship school of the Korean public education system, and the most respected in the country. Today was not only my first day of class, but also the beginning of the new academic year for all SNU students. (The Korean academic year begins in the spring.)

The main gate of the university was decorated with a sign announcing the matriculation ceremony.

The shape of the gate is quite unusual. It is meant to resemble Korean letters. You can clearly see the first syllable of 'Seoul', 서 (seo). I think the rest maybe is supposed to resemble the first syllable of 'university', 대 (dae), although I can't figure out how that could be. Maybe Erma can help here. [Thanks, Erma for pointing out in a comment that the right side is a small (apparently epiphytic) ㄷ, the letter representing the d sound at the beginning of the Korean word for university. -- note added by Lance March 4.]

SNU is a steeply sloped campus, set in the foothills of Gwanak Mountain. The views can be quite dramatic, although today it was a bit hazy.


There were a lot of banner recruiting signs all over campus. Since SNU has the country's brightest students, its graduates are in high demand. This sign is for the Boston Consulting Group. Most of the signs were announcing meetings with recruiters taking place later in the week.


Let's be sfersian!


There were a number of Pojang Macha like this one set up around campus, selling hot snacks.


I don't know if these are there every day, or if these were serving the large crowds expected for the opening ceremony. [It turns out these are not regularly on campus. I haven't seen them since. -- updated by Lance, March 7.]

As I walked up the hill, the sun looked eerie in the morning haze.


This is the Language Education Institute, where my classes are held. All SNU buildings are designated by a number. If you click on the picture to enlarge, you'll see that this building is number 137-1.


Just uphill from my building there is some major construction going on:


The feeling at the language school here is quite different from Yonsei. For one thing, the program is considerably smaller, so it feels more intimate. Whereas at Yonsei there were 14 classes at my level, with 12 students each, here there are 4 classes at my level, with 10 students each. And while it is a very international set of students, the ratios are more balanced than at Yonsei. This is because SNU, as part of their application process, considers nationality as well as academic merit in order to achieve a balance, whereas Yonsei automatically accepts all minimally qualified applicants.

Before I took my placement test, I jotted down the listed nationalities of the students taking the test with me. (These are only the students entering the program fresh, who need to have their Korean level evaluated; the numbers don't include continuing students.) I'll list the numbers, I found them quite interesting:

Holland: 1
Taiwan: 2
Russia: 4
Germany: 1
Malaysia: 2
Mexico: 1
Mongolian: 13 (!!!)
USA: 16
Vietnam: 1
Brazil: 1
Sweden: 2
Spain: 1
Singapore: 1
United Arab Emirates: 1
Uzbekistan: 2
Japan: 19
China: 15
Hong Kong: 3
Chile: 2
Tajikistan: 1
Thailand: 3
Poland: 1
France: 2
Philippines: 2
Korea: 6
Australia: 5

I was startled to see that one of the people taking the test was an former classmate from Yonsei, a Japanese woman. We'll call her Mayumi (not her real name). Mayumi was a very serious and successful student, but she disappeared without a trace a few weeks before the term ended. We were all worried about her. She told me that she'd had some sort of health problem and had to go back to Japan. Like me, she had spent the winter quarter at home, and was now planning to take spring term classes at SNU. I asked her why she picked SNU this time instead of returning to Yonsei. She said that she wanted to try SNU because it had fewer students and they weren't as young.

From what I could tell she's right -- the average age (and presumably maturity level) of the SNU students appeared to be higher.

In my class there were two students from mainland China (one of whom is of Korean descent, but knew no Korean before), one student from Taiwan, two from Mongolia (one of whom is of Korean descent and speaks Korean), one from Uzbekistan, one from France, one from Australia, and one other American.

[We've since added another Mongolian and a Japanese, for a total of 12 students. I was mistaken about one Mongolian being of Korean descent. They are all of Mongolian ethnicity. Two are from the capital Ulan Bator, and one is from the countryside. It also turns out that both of the mainland Chinese students are of Korean ethnicity; one grew up in a Korean-speaking household, and one didn't. -- Added by Lance, March 7.]

The class seems to be right for my level; from what I can tell, the curricula of Yonsei and SNU are structured very similarly. Some of the students spoke better than me, some worse. I knew pretty all of the material we were given for review at the beginning of class, and I know very little of the material that we'll be learning, judging from the contents of our textbook.

The classroom building is older, more run-down, and cramped compared to Yonsei's language institute. Yonsei runs a huge operation that rakes in a lot of money, which is probably why they could afford to put up a brand-new building. But I actually found the facilities inside the classroom to be better at SNU -- there's a computer built into the teacher's desk, for example.

After class I went over to the Student Union's main dining hall for lunch. I've posted before about student dining halls, but I don't believe I've ever shown a picture of the post-prandial section. Koreans generally don't drink with their meals (unless it's alcohol), and as far as I can tell don't use napkins either. Those are after-meal activities. So after you drop off your tray of dirty dishes, you get in line for a drink.


This is a particularly fancy water dispenser. You grab a clean cup, and then you choose either near-boiling hot water from the left-hand-side taps, or cold water from the right-hand-side taps. I like hot water, but let me tell you, a fashioning a cup out of metal is a pretty stupid idea if you want to drink hot liquids from it. A lot students mix hot and cold to get the right temperature.

You sort of stand there and drink quickly, trying not to slow the line down too much. Then you drop your dirty cup into one of the blue tubes at the far end of the dispenser.

In every dining hall I've been in, right near the exit are some napkin dispensers and a mirror. (They are against the far wall in the photo above.) So you can wipe your face, and then check to see if you've done it right. (It's really a pretty civilized idea to be able to look in a mirror after the messy business of eating.)

One last photo -- this is for Erma. It's Gate #8 on campus.