Changdeok Palace || 창덕궁

Changgyeong Palace || 창경궁

Gyeongbok Palace || 경복궁

Going to the palaces was probably what I was looking forward to the most in this trip. I went to Gyeongbok first, and it was beautiful. They all were, actually. This palace was built in 1395, but was destroyed by fire during the Japanese invasion. It was later restored during the reign of King Gojong.

Here are the pictures I took over there, brought to you by my high quality phone camera (sorry!).

Liebster Award

I wanted to post this before I start the parade of posts about my trip to Korea.I was nominated by Korean Vitamin and My Korean Diary a while a ago but hadn’t even noticed! I’m sorry ^^;

Rules:
1. List 11 random facts about yourself.
2. Answer the questions designated by the blogger(s) who nominated you.
3. Place YOUR nominations for the Liebster Award! Nominate five (or more) other bloggers that have less than 200 followers. Make sure to notify them via comment/email, etc.
4. Make up a set of questions for those nominated bloggers to answer.
5. Display the Liebster award badge on your blog!

Back from Korea!

I’m back from Korea! And with a terrible jet lag. I woke up like two hours ago and it’s 12:35 am here.

In the following days I will be uploading pictures from my trip, right now I’m in the process of sorting them out. I didn’t take that many pictures mostly because most of the time I was distracted and just forgot. Also, I took most of the pictures with my phone because I was too lazy to take out my camera, so the quality is uh, not very good? I’m sorry! I did take some pictures with my camera and you will be able to tell them apart from the phone pictures instantly. Like I said, I was having lots of fun so taking pictures kind of skipped my mind? I’m kind of regretting it right now.

D-2 to Korea!

I feel like I always start my posts with “It’s been a while since I last posted!” but it’s true, it has been a while. The reason I’m writing this post is because I’ll be heading to South Korea in two days. (eeeek!) At this point I’m just trying to decide which places I want to go, things I want to do, (foods I want to eat!) etc. Since I will be in Korea for only two and a half weeks, I’m going to focus on Seoul only. Later when I go back to study abroad I can travel to other cities.

On making mistakes and looking like a fool.

Last night I was catching up on 고양이를 통해 만난 흔해 빠질 수 있는 그와 그녀의 인연 also known as 고.흔.연 (I get why the feel the need to shorten it). I have a hard time finding webtoons that I like, since I’m not really into comics/manga and I get bored of them easily. But last year Archana told me to check out this one because it had really pretty art, and it does! To be honest the art is what I like the most about it, but the story is nice too. It’s a typical girl meets boy story, except these two happen to meet because of a cat… and then it turns out the cat can turn into a human at times… and the main guy is a sassy ice king at school but when he’s alone he’s a cat loving freak… yeah. Of course there’s a lot more going on as it’s still an ongoing webtoon. If I somehow managed to make you interested, you can check it out here.

As I was reading 고.흔.연 last night, I came across the image you can see above which says “뒷일이 무서워서 제리 겁먹으면 이 세상에 할 수 있는 건 아무것도 없어.” “If you get scared of things before doing them because the consequences are scary, then you won’t be able to do anything in this world.” These are not deep moving words, yet they’re what ~inspired~  today’s post. Let’s focus on the “being scared of something beforehand” and ignore the “scary consequences” part- in the story she was going to enter a drawing competition against her parents will, but I don’t think any of us will get disowned by self-studying a foreign language, right?

As foreign language learners we are scared of making mistakes. We don’t want to seem silly, or dumb, so we often end up limiting ourselves just to be safe. I think that’s one of the biggest mistakes we make, because if we don’t even try then how are we going to improve? This is not a lecture to everyone reading this, it’s actually some sort of note-to-self since I’m absolutely 100% guilty of doing it. Even if people talk (or write) to me in an foreign language and I understand, I will reply to them in English or Spanish just to avoid making a fool of myself. (Can’t let them know I’m human!) I’ve been a bit more daring lately, and it has helped me quite a lot. I wish I didn’t freak out internally at the first sign of misunderstanding though.

I think this is by far the longest post I’ve written…

Naver Newsstand

This morning I was on Naver trying to find something to read and was surprised to see they have a new feature called Naver Newsstand. Basically it just lets you browse news articles by newspapers. I like this format a lot more than the old one, not only because it is easier to browse but because the design is also very ~aesthetically pleasing~ (I’ve always wanted to use those words in a post).

TOPIK

For a while now I’ve been thinking about taking the TOPIK in 2013. The problem is that I’m not sure which level I should attempt. Beginner level seems too easy, but I don’t think I’m at the intermediate level yet. So, I decided to attempt the 26th TOPIK (beginner), and here are the results:

First Post!

I made this blog at the end of last year but I never bothered to post anything because I didn’t really have anything interesting to write about. Except now I actually have a motivation to study harder; I’m going to Korea in a few months.

I already booked everything so now all there’s left to do is plan my schedule; figure out which places I want to visit, which foods I want to try, etc. I can say that until now this site has been my best friend.

I guess that’s it for today. Aren’t first posts always awkward? I’ll be posting regularly from now on so I hope each time it gets less awkward.^^