{"id":113,"date":"2016-03-02T14:05:18","date_gmt":"2016-03-02T14:05:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sofagoesabroad.wordpress.com\/?p=112"},"modified":"2016-11-26T15:55:02","modified_gmt":"2016-11-26T15:55:02","slug":"campusleben-und-kimchi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/campusleben-und-kimchi\/","title":{"rendered":"Campus life and Kimchi"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the last member\u00a0of my group of friends from university\u00a0I finally made it abroad last week. It took me a good\u00a014 hours from Stuttgart over London to now be about 8.500km away from Regensburg.<\/span><\/p>\n

I will be spending the next four months in South Korea’s capital: Seoul! With over 10 million people living only in the urban core alone, Seoul is the 14th largest city in the world, embedded in the second largest metropolitan region worldwide – with just about 26 million inhabitants.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Looking eastward from the top of Namsan Tower onto the seemingly endless city and the Han River that flows through it.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After downloading Korea’s KakaoTalk messenger, buying\u00a0a T-money card for public transportation, and purchasing a Korean sim card, I’m ready for everyday life in Seoul! Since it’s\u00a0still winter it’s still pretty cold outside, and spring only comes out and shows itself every now and then – so until further notice coat, scarf, and boots are needed to explore the city.<\/span><\/p>\n

After four weeks of having time off from school, and after growing accustomed to my new home and trying all sorts of new things\u00a0during the first few days\u00a0in Korea, classes have started again. For one semester I will be an exchange student at Soongsil University, taking classes such as\u00a0Politics, Society, and Culture of North Korea<\/em>,\u00a0Consumer Behavior<\/em>,\u00a0and\u00a0Global Political Economy<\/em> – a colorful mix of political, economic, and cultural courses. At the same time I want to improve my Korean skills, after taking a language course last semester on Germany (\uc548\ub155\ud558\uc138\uc694? \uae40\uce58, \uac10\uc0ac\ud569\ub2c8\ub2e4! \ub3c5\uc77c \ub300\uc0ac\uad00\uc774 \uc5b4\ub514\uc5d0 \uc788\uc2b5\ub2c8\uce74? – or something like that).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Soongsil University’s campus. The school\u00a0was founded in Pyongyang in 1897 as the first modern university in Korea by a US-American missionary, and was reopened in Seoul after the Korean War in 1954.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even after just the first\u00a0day of class I can say that studying at Soongsil and everyday life on campus is much different than at my home university in Regensburg.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since all school buildings, including the dormitory and sports facilities, are located on the densely built campus, it is full of life and buzzing activity during the week, especially during breaks in between classes. This morning, the campus seemed to awake from its summer break slumber, when all 15.000 students arrived at the same time. When I was on my way to my first class this morning at eight thirty, K-Pop music was already playing from speakers located throughout the entire campus. On the main square in front of the student union, school clubs had set up their booths to advertise, with members dancing, playing instruments, and distributing pamphlets to convince people to join. I spontaneously signed up for Soongsil’s wine tasting club. The club meets one evening\u00a0a week to taste and talk about different wines and to have pleasant conversation (at this point I have to explain that wine is generally much more expensive at the supermarket than in Germany, with a bottle starting at around 8 Euros – which is why this club is an excellent opportunity to still enjoy one or two lovely sips. And of course to get to know Koreans and practice speaking Korean – please don’t judge).<\/span><\/p>\n

Classes are also held differently than in Germany. To begin with, professors insist on keeping general attendance in all classes. If one is absent too many times in the course of the semester, one automatically fails the class. It depends on the professor as to how many absences can be received; however, in some cases repeated tardiness can be enough to be marked as absent (this stands in stark contrast to university in Germany, where professors usually have a do-as-you-wish-but-if-you-fail-the-exam-it’s-your-fault kind of attitute).<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition, many different grades count towards the final grade. Attendance, in-class participation, (pop) quizzes, presentations, and homework count into the final grade just like the\u00a0two exams per semester do.\u00a0These are all taken during midterm and finals week, respectively, so that the semester ends after exactly 16 weeks.<\/span><\/p>\n

Last week I moved into the on-campus dorm, which provides enough story material for an entire blogpost. And on that note I’ll stop right here for now with the reporting and let this be a first introduction to student life at Soongsil University.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

P.S.: The food in Korea is amazing – but also deserves a dedicated blogpost at a later point. \uc548\ub155\ud788 \uac00\uc138\uc694!<\/span><\/p>\n

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Just a short preview into the wonderful culinary world of Korea – stay tuned!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Als letzter der Regensburger Freundesgruppe habe ich es letzte Woche auch endlich in mein Auslandssemester geschafft. Von Stuttgart \u00fcber London bin ich \u00fcber 14 Stunden unterwegs gewesen und befinde mich jetzt ca. 8500km von Regensburg entfernt. Verschlagen hat es mich f\u00fcr die n\u00e4chsten vier Monate in die Hauptstadt S\u00fcdkoreas: Seoul! Mit \u00fcber 10 Millionen Einwohnern… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":219,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[17,129],"tags":[91],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philip-sudkorea","category-english","tag-seoul"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["de","en"],"languages":{"de":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/fullsizerender-5.jpg?fit=1751%2C925","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p81wMH-1P","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4519,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/4519"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sofagoesabroad.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}