After Baengnyeongdo and Jejudo, I spent a week and a half at my university in Yongin, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. While some of the other students had troubles at their universities or found the area boring, this was an excellent place to study, travel from, and to be an English speaker. Since it's known for its programs in English and translation, there are lots of English speakers there. I went for runs around the campus and down to the town at the gate of the university, Wangsan. If I wanted to get out of the small town, it took about 45 minutes to get to the nearest city on the bus (Seongnam), and about 1 hour 20 minutes to get to Seoul. I certainly recommend this school for future EAPSI students. Here are a few final images of the campus.
There are some very beautiful flowers and trees on the campus --I've shown a few of the areas I've run by before. Here are some red canna lilies lined up on the main road.
There were also mugungwha (rose of sharon, the national flower of Korea) blooming when I left HUFS.
And here's the trail I walked every day to get between my dormitory (the English teaching dorm) and the Natural Sciences building where my lab was. It was a great start to the day, and only a little creepy at night... there were often little birds singing in the trees here.
These cicadas are everywhere in Korea, and they're sort of hard to find because they camouflage into the trees and seem to be up in the top branches. They're large --a few inches --and SO loud! They make an odd sound that's sort of like a chainsaw.
I did some final analyses while at HUFS, including a total organic carbon (TOC) measurement using a nice Shimadzu instrument in Dr. Guyoung Gang's lab. It was very generous of him to let me use the instrument. I thawed the samples with more than 30 g water (you can see some of them below are a little colored by the pollutants we collected), and separated out some sample to leave with Dr. Lee for his lab. Unfortunately, the TOC in the fog samples I analyzed was low (<5 ppm), which means that there aren't a lot of organic compounds for me to work with in my lab experiments at CSU ---but hopefully we'll get some interesting results based on the inorganic components.
The town that HUFS is in, Wangsan (which means "big mountain"), is very beautiful: there are some mountains surrounding the school (of course), one of which is tall enough to be a ski area in the winter. There are also several streams in the area with nice greenery and egrets that dot the marshy landscape. I took this image while on a run outside of campus. You can just barely see some of the egrets, which are white birds about the shape of herons.
On my second-to-last night, Dr. Lee and his lab took me to a dottorimuk (acorn jelly) restaurant, since I'm vegetarian and there were lots of options for me there --very sweet of them! They told me jokingly that we were going to get squirrel food, and then that there was also squirrel served there... The restaurant was back behind Wangsan, and had funny paintings of squirrels on the buildings.
Here are Taehyeon, Kyoungun and Sungwon at the restuarant --I think they actually do the acorn harvesting here, and they also have a ceramics making facility where they make all the dishes for the restaurant and sell some as well.
Here's us at the table (Dr. Lee/Taehyoung is facing me).
This is dottorimuk, with a nice salad made with acorn on top, too. Very tasty! There aren't many salads here in Korea, and we got two with this meal!
We also had some dong dong ju (unfiltered, traditional rice wine) --not to be confused with the very similar alcohol called makkoli. It's an emulsion, so when you spin the glass a little, it makes these neat patterns.
The main course was this delicious cold noodle soup with big pieces of veggies and dottorimuk in it.
After saying goodbye on my last night, I took these shots looking out of the Natural Sciences building. The campus is so lovely with the mountains and the frequent fog that surrounds them.
...And then onward to Seoul!
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