Busy, Busy, Busy!

Sorry it's been a couple days since I have posted, they are not going to allow me to get bored while I am here at Hanyang!  I am ready for tomorrow so I can get caught up on some sleep!  (we don't have class on Wednesdays =)

Yesterday, (Monday) morning, I traveled to Hanyang for the first time for our opening ceremony and orientation.  They talked about the history of the summer school program and how it keeps growing year to year.  They also gave us free t-shirts!  Yay, my favorite!!  Everyone from the university is extremely friendly and they seem genuinely excited for us all to be here.
The campus is very much like WKU; it is beautifully nestled on a steep "little" hill that I will have the pleasure of dragging myself up 2-3 times daily in this wonderfully sticky humid/ sweltering hot/OCCASIONALLY breezy, South Korean climate!  It is a beautiful campus though, they keep it very clean and they have put a lot of effort into the layout of the campus as well as their landscaping.

                                                          Rui and I at the ceremony..

                                               Walking up one side of "Hanyang Mountain"

After the ceremony and orientation the staff split us up onto 13 different buses and took us on an intense 6 hour tour of the city of Seoul.
    First we went to a cultural park where there were several traditional Korean houses.  Our Hanyang tour guide walked us through and told us everything we could ever want to know about traditional Korean life.

Grace, our precious guide, in front of a hut that would be placed over the site where winter kimchi was buried in order to keep it warm and let it cure even in the bitter cold winter months in Korea.

We visited Namsan tower, a landmark in Seoul.  It is about the equivalent of Las Vegas's Stratosphere, only Namsan tower is also on top of a mountain which makes for an even more expansive view of the Seoul Area.

As you can see, Seoul just keeps going, and going, and going, an...

 

 

We visited Gyeongbukgung Palace in Seoul.  This palace was built in 1395, but was later burned and abandoned for almost three centuries, then reconstructed in 1867.  It was the main and largest palace of the Five Grand Palaces built by the Joseon Dynasty.  The meaning of the name; "Palace" [Gung] "Greatly Blessed by Heaven" [Gyeongbok].  It was very interesting to be in this place, I think I will have to make it a point to go there again to take my time and enjoy it at my own pace.