Life This Week in South Korea: December 2-8, 2024

Monday, Dec 2

I slept. And napped. And slept some more. Not sure what’s going on but suddenly I need All The Sleep.

I got up to meet some friends for dinner at 7. It was a goodbye dinner for a lovely young French woman, who is literally a ray of sunshine. She was in my third Korean 1 class and lived in my building for the past few months. She did try to kill me on a mountaintop once, but I forgave her for that because she is otherwise such a delight.

I’m sure I’ve discussed this here before, but making friends in this situation is so unusual. It’s so transient, as many people are just here studying for 3, 6, 9 months, not the full two years as I am. So you make a friend, and then they leave. And then you make a new friend, and then they leave. Etc. And between that and The Great Friend Debacle of June 2024, I’ve just been less and less invested in making new friends. But at the same time I keep hoping to find a new “activity companion” to replace You Know Who.

Sigh.

Tuesday, Dec 3

Last day of vacation. Usually on the last day of vacation I either spend the day doing something really fun before buckling down to the time-suck that is school…OR I do Absolutely Nothing.

Today I opted for Absolutely Nothing, and literally stayed in bed til dinner arrived around 6pm.

I was just about to set the phone down and shut my eyes around 11pm when…bam…Martial Law was announced. For the full story, visit. But the net for me was…it kept me up The Entire Night, reading all the social posts and news stories about What The Heck is Going On Out There! I wasn’t afraid, as we didn’t know exactly what was going to happen, I was more intrigued as this has been declared a historic event. Martial Law has not been declared in South Korea in over 40 years, and that was bad news.

Once I heard the Parliament had voted unanimously to revoke (repeal?) the declaration of martial law around 1am, I was, again, just about to set the phone down and go to sleep…and then all the messages from folks back home who were just getting wind of this drama, began pinging in. And then I had to explain I’M OKAY and what was going on about a dozen times…and then I got reinvested all over again (is that redundant?) and I was awake and scrolling and sending messages back and forth with people here and home…until 6:57am when I said GO! TO! SLEEP! And I slept til 9:30.

Perfect situation for starting new class today. I’m exhausted, blurry-eyed, and distracted.

I had planned to go to a cute Christmas-themed cafe this morning before class, but political drama prevailed and I went nowhere.

Wed, Dec 4

First day of class was alright. I got the very first teacher I had here in the fall of 2023…who is cute and engaging but TALKSOFAST I can’t keep up. We’ll see how that goes. However, I also got the same classroom as last term, the big room with comfy chairs and spacious desks and windows. So that’s good.

I continue to be distracted by news of the fallout from last night’s chaos here. Many parties are calling for the president’s impeachment, stocks have gone down, the won has gone down, convenience stores have been ransacked of canned goods and instant ramen. Unrelated to the political activity, the train workers were already planning to go out on strike on December 5, so that’s just gonna muck things up even more. There will be more traffic, the busses will be overloaded.

Good times.

Thur, Dec 5

Went with a friend this morning to a really pretty bakery that’s all decked out for Christmas. It will be featured in an upcoming post so I’ll just share these two pictures here.

Met my Tue-Thur teacher this afternoon and just adore him 🙂 He’s very engaging and smiley, speaks slowly, uses vocabulary at our level…if he says anything he thinks we might not know, he repeats it in excellent English (he went to elementary school in the US, so learned English and has no discernible Korean accent when he speaks it), and he really goes back and forth between Korean and English a lot. One of the first things he said to us was that mistakes are part of learning…and he’d rather see a student try, and make a mistake, than just sit in silence and not even try. I was like, oh, we’ll get along well, cuz i make a LOT of mistakes! I’m pretty sure he said this is his first class at my university, so he’s not all beaten down yet, ha ha.

Just one more day til the weekend!

Fri, Dec 6

Woo hoo, the plot thickens! NOW, the president’s OWN party wants to impeach him. Two things have come to light: 1) it looks like perhaps the calling for martial law was just a decoy to keep the attention off the fact that he sent military police to (another place, I forget the name) where some important opposing party mucky-mucks were. Fun Fact: They were actually right outside, even before the martial law decree was decreed…almost as if they knew in advance, AHEM.  So, within TWO MINUTES of the ML order, these police were supposed to go in and arrest these guys the President wanted out of his way – he SAYS they were involved in voter fraud in the last election (or some election) and he was accusing them of anti-South Korean activity. And the whole melee at the National Assembly was just so no one would notice what was going on over THERE! Or something like that, ha ha. Don’t quote me. More details keep coming out and I’m just fascinated. 

Anyway, all the thousands of brave Korean citizens are still out in the streets (not MY streets) protesting and calling for President Yoon’s immediate impeachment and arrest. There’s supposed to be a meeting or a vote or something at 7pm Saturday about it. And as recently as yesterday his own party was like, oh, come on, it wasn’t so bad, leave the poor guy alone., but now there are rumors that he’s going to declare martial law again (what’s with this guy?) and now they’re like NOPE. TAKE HIM OUT.

Fascinating.

It’s like a real life k-drama. If only there was a little romance in there somewhere.

Sorry, the blog has turned into Korean Political Days of Our Lives.

Sat, Dec 7

Had tentative plans with myself to go out in the late afternoon to do pictures in a cool alleyway area…did not do that. I’ve been being very productive lately (it’ll wear off once class gets harder, but I’m availing myself of the motivation for now). I got myself a gift – a cool little video camera that’s a camera and gimbal (camera stabilizer) in one…it does other tricks as well and produces really lovely quality of videos. I’ve been looking at it (DJI Osmo Pocket 3) since I was still in NY and I finally bit the bullet and just Did It cuz I’m tired of lugging my big camera around everywhere and I take terrible video with my cell-phone cuz my hands have gotten so shaky, SO.

The camera arrived a couple days ago and I’ve been watching tutorials on how to manage all the bells and whistles…and then one of the tutorial guys starts saying things along the lines of “make sure your editing rig (editing rig??) can handle the large files that will come out of the camera.” Oh crap. A) I have no video editing software! I didn’t even think of that! And B) at this point my poor lil laptop can just barely run Photoshop due to small amount of remaining available memory. And I already save almost everything directly to an external hard drive. It’s the apps – mainly all the Adobe apps (Photoshop, Bridge, Camera Raw) that are taking up like 80% of the available space. And now I have to add some kind of video editing software??

Ugh.

So I downloaded something called Davinci Resolve which I’ve heard is a powerful program and it has a free version. BUT it took almost all the remaining available space on my hard drive. And Photoshop will not run like that. It needs room to move around. So I spent awhile (hour+) trying to figure out what else I could uninstall…and then thinking maybe it’s just time for a new laptop, so I spent another 2 hours researching laptops with all the specs I want AND, as long as I’m getting a new laptop I should get one with a Korean/English keyboard (cuz hooking up the freestanding one is a pain in the butt so I just never do it), and, well, that doesn’t seem to exist at a place where I can put the computer on a US credit card. So I’m doing all this money finagling in my mind (and I’m a slow mind money finagler) and in the end I was like STOP, JUST STOP. And bit another bullet and uninstalled some more things that I didn’t want to uninstall, but what am I gonna do…I should not be rushing into another large purchase. I’ll keep thinking on that…while I try running 2000000things on my computer that only holds 1000000things. This laptop was never meant to be a primary computer. It was always just the sidekick to my desktop, which did all the heavy lifting.

So. Now, in addition to learning the new camera, I am also learning the new video editing program…THERE’S A WHOLE LOTTA LEARNING GOING ON.

And I did remote work and watched a k-drama.

OH – today was the vote to impeach the Korean President…and all but three members of the ruling party just up and walked out without even voting!!! WTH? Without them there weren’t enough people voting to pass the bill (or whatever). It’s like crazy town here this week! So he’s not impeached, but his party has said they will start taking away his powers, whatever that exactly means. He DID go on tv this morning to apologize. Too little, too late, dude. The protests outside turned into a big dance party once the vote was over…people had their kpop concert light sticks and were singing kpop songs. It’s wild. I kinda wanted to go out and see it but…foreigners have been cautioned to Not Get Involved. Immigration does not take kindly to that sort of thing.

Sun, Dec 8

I had essentially the same tentative plan for getting out of the house late in the day but…I’m being productive again, so…I’m going with it. It’s not like I don’t have a million things to do here. More camera tutorials, more remote work, did some studying and homework, started looking for a good (free) Davinci tutorial. God forbid I get all my trash and recycling out.

I did get out in the evening with my friend, we went to the mall for dinner. She had to pick up an ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins that a friend had ordered because it came with a photo card of a very popular actor, Byeon Woo Seok. Kpop and kdrama fans go crazy for photo cards. So we got jjajangmyeon – noodles with black bean sauce. Yum. And the good news is that cuz the friend didn’t care as much about the cake as the card, I got to have a piece. Ha. I hardly ever have ice cream here cuz I don’t have a freezer. Well, I have one, but it doesn’t actually freeze.

And that’s another week. 3,340 down. 768 to go. WHOA. Wow. That was sobering.

Okay. See ya later love ya bye.