Orientation, Judo and BBQ

At School

On Tuesday we had the orientation for all the international students, so we got to meet Johnathan. Johnathan is the last Concordia student, also in IR and he is living in Seoul (for some reason... I think he likes taking the train every morning!). Anyway, orientation was short and slightly redundant, since Mr. Kim briefed us pretty well by email. Found out that we are basically all the exchange students at INHA besides the billions of Chinese and a few Middle-Eastern and French grad students who mostly keep to themselves. However, in class I met Suzi, a Singaporean Economics student (as a sidenote, Singaporeans do not look either Chinese or Korean. I can't really explain it, it's just like that. Also, it seems that Koreans have great difficulty telling in Korean and Chinese people apart! Actually, almost every professor has mentioned it...). Getting back to topic, Suzi's in most of my classes, which is pretty cool.

Judo

Anyway, after class, I went to Judo with Remi. I mostly watched since I didn't know any of the moves (all the people there have been doing it for years), but it was still quite fun. For those who don't know, Judo is the art of NOT punching or kicking people. Instead, you throw, flip, lock, trip, strangle or do practically anything else to them (except punch or kick them). Pleasant, I know. The session started with the warm-up/stretching, then there was the practice (which involved doing one arbitrary move on your partner 20 times and then having him do the same to you - and repeat, with different techniques) and finally there were the combats. Obviously, they were much more fun. Seeing people thrown each other around is always fun!

BBQ & Blackcat

After Judo, we had a type of Korean BBQ, which involved roasting thick slices of unsalted pork (kinda like bacon) on a grill set into the middle of the table. Other things were available for roasting as well, such as an assortment of mushrooms, garlic and stuff I have no names for. Once roasted, the stuff is placed into a leaf of lettuce (using chopsticks, of course) and then eaten. Yummy. As we were sitting down, Agata called and expressed interest in joining us as she had finished tutoring early, so she came on over. Cost of meal: around 6$ a person (3.50$ for just the meat!). So not too bad!

Once our meal was devoured, we joined Peter and the gang and Blackcat for another very nice evening.