In the last
few weeks, not much happened for me. Life is going its steady course and time
goes quite quickly. I had my first exam in the morning, so now I also have at
least a bit of an idea how the exam levels will be here.
Two weeks
ago I went to a match of FC Seoul, the number one football (or should I say
soccer?) club of Seoul and last year’s champion. This year, they will probably
end up around fourth place and to be honest, the level of the match was
surprisingly low. The way they played was quite physical and it seemed like the
referee got a big wad of cash shoved into his hands before the match.
Level-wise I would compare it to roughly the middle to bottom teams back home
in the Eredivisie. Also something interesting to see was that they played in a
stadium which was built for the 2002 World Cup (which took place in South-Korea
and Japan) and therefore had 60000 seats and was simply massive. However, since
football is not that big of a sport here (I think it ranks about third after
baseball and then basketball here), only 10000-15000 seats were filled,
resulting in a very desolate stadium and a weird atmosphere. A nice result of
the large capacity and low demand, however, was the fact that tickets were
quite cheap: 14000 KRW or about 9,50 euro. It was a nice trip and the stadium
itself was very impressive. Also funny was that every time the opposing team
had a corner or a free kick, the big screen would show “Vuvuzela time” and
everyone was making as much noise as possible to distract the opposing team.
Movie
The day
before the soccer match we went to see a Korean movie (I think it was called
Blue Salt/Hindsight) which in itself was an okay movie. It was basically a mix
of action and romance in the same way that you see in movies from the west but
everything of course took place in Korea. It was quite interesting to see some
things which I recognize from my life here, such as the drinking culture,
general environments and habits and of course Seoul itself.
Same old, same old and exams
For the
rest of the weeks, I basically just followed classes and did not much else. In
the weekend I studied quite a bit since today (Tuesday) I had an exam of which
it was pretty much unknown what to expect. We did not have any practice
exercises or slides, just the notes we made during class and the book.
Thankfully the exam itself turned out to be quite easy, but that is not always
a good thing here, since you are graded
according to what the rest of the class did. This means that for this
particular exam, the person who gave the best answer of the group to a
sub-question gets full points and the rest gets a lower amount of points
depending on how their answer compared to the best answer. For some other
courses your final grade is distributed according to a scale, meaning that the
top something percent get an A or A+ and the next something percent get a B or
B+ et cetera. While this increases competition, I don’t really like this
system, since it does not really promote cooperation; why would you help others
if it only increases their chance of overtaking you? Plus-side of this, however
is also that if everyone messes up and the highest grade is a 6.0, that person
would normally get an A or A+, which translates into a 9 or 10 at Tilburg
University.
Busy schedule
I am afraid
I will not be doing too many interesting things in the coming weeks, since the
work keeps coming and we will not have a single holiday until the end of
semester. Thankfully I have Friday off every week, so I can still make time to
do fun things. I am planning on going to the zoo here soon, so hopefully I will
have some interesting stories soon!
Thankfully we play soccer with a group of people from the dorm quite
often and we found a group of Koreans who visit the field every Sunday, so we
can have some matches every week.
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