AiriZel: Thoughts

So I suppose a couple of things must come up.

First, I’ll be in Minneapolis for Nats among other things from August 20th to the 23rd.

I just took the most random nap that might have just fixed my sleep schedule. I slept from 8:30PM to 4AM. Still awake at 5:30 working on some ruby coding and writing down stuff in my moleskine.

Anyway, I’ve now wasted time till 6PM so I’m going to go back to mastering Ruby on Rails.

-Sebastian

So yesterday I went to a Train/John Masyer concert. Now, I have to give props for David Kastelman for cnvincing me to go this concert because it was an experience I have not been exposed to. Yes, I’ve been to concerts and yes I’ve had the luxury and watching some of the cooler groups I like, but I’ve never set up on a lawn and listened to musicians from there.

Well, I’m getting ahead of myself. To detail this weekend, we must begin with my last full-time work of the summer. I finished around 5PM and then left to help Keila move into my sublet (she pushed her flight back to Monday so she could watch the concert. I can say now that she had some great foresight.).

Anyway, I went shopping on Friday to get some Thai Iced Tea ingredients, which totally worked. Go hong kong market. I also went to the real market and bought vegetables, meat, spices, and other stuff to actually cook with.

The rest was in my previous post.

Now onto the concert. We got 5 Guys (we here forth shall refer to David, Keila, Sirui and myself) and then drove to the Comcast theater in Hartford CT. There we enjoyed a great show along with a 20:1 white to non-white ratio//5:1 girl to guy ratio concert of Train (who was pretty good. The guy signed his own shirt and threw it out into the crowd and played both of his super hits, Drops of Jupiter and Hey, Soul Sister) and John Mayer.

Now, a few notes on John Mayer. Prior to this event, I had absolutely no idea how good he was at the guitar. Having played and jammed with a lot of my friends in high school, I can say that his level of music talent is ridiculously high. He also plays in a pentamic scale (I think I spelled that right), which is the first time I’ve seen someone do that. He was so absolutely amazing live that my respect for him has gone up through the roof. I mean he played for a couple who just got engaged a bunch of impromptu verses, made a joke about the amount of pot-smoking that was going on around me on the lawn. Additionally, he just jammed in a style similar to what I did in high school with people on stage. That was awesome. It was a great concert and I definitely want to go to more concerts now.

Anyway, afterwards we got some random amounts of lost and then picked up some taco bell, talked till 5AM and called it a night as the sun was rising.

Good stuff,
-Sebastian

Yesterday I made some Onigiri with a tuna salad core (and used some rice vinegar, sesame seeds and learned of an amazing thing.

If you boil condensed milk in a can for a few hours (that is a lot of hours), then it becomes caramel! Who knew.

Additionally, I visited Froyoworld yesterday and I’d have to make a couple of observations. First, there aren’t nearly enough froyo flavors (although the toppings are sufficient, having only 6 flavors seems pretty bad). Second, given how big the building it is in is, I was very surprised to see how small the place was, it was like a hallway more than a cafe.

Other than that, it’s nice to have a cali-style Froyo place in the Have.

John Mayer and Train is tonight. More on that later.
-Sebastian

So I’m absolutely exhausted. Both mentally and physically. I definitely need a break at some point. <-- Me almost 2+ weeks ago. This second installment to the NSLI-Y series is hella overdue. So without further ado...

Korea – The Homestay – First impressions

Well today is the morning after the first night at the homestay. Man, not what I expected. From what I undestood, the homestay program was supposed to put us with a traditional korean nuclear family. That is to say a mother, father, and kids. Instead I and Nicolas Pang (a very bright kid from Hawaii) ended up with a god-fearing grandmother, similar in style to that you would see in a western movie in regards to an old grandmother figure.

So what does that mean? It means near unlimited freedoms equivalent to what I have not only in the home, but also what I’ll have when I’m in college. Simply put, the grandmother of this small apartment lives by herself. If you put it into the perspective of a grandmother living alone, the apartment is not that bad at all. I could definitely live in something like this by myself (which brings me to the funny point that I may not have a suite room year 1 at Yale. But rather a very big room. I don’t know how that’s going to go). That said, for the three of us, it’s a bit smaller than anticipated (but not overtly uncomfortable by any means).

In addition, the son, IE the hypothetical father figure of this house seems to work all the time, living away from this apartment. In addition, the grandmother is a god-fearing woman who attends church everyday until 6PM. So what does that afford Nick nad myself? Well we get keys to this apartment and the freedom to come and go as we please whenever. That’s a lot more freedom than I thought I’d have, but also we lose out on the immersion into Korean families. I feel worse for Nicholas than I do for my own situation, having grown up in in fact a Korean nuclear family, knowing that my father sits at the head of the table, knowing that the respect I show to my parents is infinite. Nick will never have that experience at this rate.

That all said, the family is still very supportive as if we were college students. The grandmother graciously took us to the nearby YMCA equivalent so that we could spend 31000 won to open membership. I’ll probably be heading there every morning from 6-6:30 or around that time (with the exception of maybe wednesdays when the program takes us away). She also took us into town, which is about 1 km away I think from this apartment complex, where we bought bread, power adapters (since the prongs on american adapters differ), and ice cream. Lots of ice cream.

So moving on to talking about last night. Man I could not sleep well. I constantly felt like I was waking up, and my back couldn’t seem to realign itself with the bed. Meh, hopefully tonight will be better. Also, my eyes seem to be failing me lately. I don’t know if it’s because I’m tired, but I can’t seem to focus my eyes on people. Words and letters no problem. People… they seem to be blurry at a not that far distance. I’m thinking it’s just a lingering effect of my jetlag, but if it continues when I return to the States, I’ll get a contact in my right eye or something.

Back to the living of Korean life!
-Sebastian

So things to take away from me last year… I was considering my living arrangements in L-Dub (yeah I should be worried haha), I expressed my initial doubts about the current situation (ooo! a developing plot point), and I went to the gym.. Again, typos and stuff weren’t fixed to save the authencity of a computerized post haha…

-Sebastian

So yesterday was a day in which East Rock was heavily involved.

Reason? Well I woke up in the morning, got an hour of FFX in (I’m actually to the point where it freezes again :/) and then made myself a nice breakfast that included onigiri rice balls, some nice bacon + sunny-over eggs.

Then I went up to East Rock (181 Mitchell) to play some tennis with James (IE get destroyed at Tennis with James… I wish I was better at more of these sports). Anyway, after riding up there, I spent some time getting back down to my place where I began cooking! What did I make? Well, I made the ingredients for a burrito, and a salsa/guacamole concoction that combined lime juice, various vegetables (del peppers, tomatoes, avocados, onions, green peppers) and what not together with some lime juice, some lemons (sliced and diced) and some tomato base. Man did it turn out really really good!

Also cooked like 2 pounds of chicken to be used in burritos and a chicken salad, for which I made a dressing for a salad that had corn, lettuce, basil, hard-boiled eggs, onions, some tomato slices, raisins, and cumin.

Then made some lemonade, cooked some beans and rice for the burritos and got on my way.

Renting a zipcar, I drove up to East Rock Rock (not a double typo, it’s actually called the Rock in East Rock haha) dropped off Keila and Monica before going down, parking the car, and driving the car to a curb to park on and walking all the way back up.

That said, it’s a long hike to get all the way to the top of East rock rock. The solution? Hitch hike. David and I managed to flag down a kind gentleman in a jeep who took us to the top of East Rock Rock in a fraction of the time it would have taken us to walk up that distance. Although it sounds a bit sketch to go hitch hiking, it was totally worth getting up there before the sun completely disappeared and enjoying the meal.

After chilling for a long time, we eventually headed back down, but that location of East Rock Rock is absolutely amazing and I would definitely go again.

-Sebastian

So I’m generally a hardened individual who has low expectations and whose tear ducts have pretty much dried up.

So I don’t know why, but whenever I read this strip, I get a bit teary. Constantly. By far the cutest thing I’ve seen in the month of July and something that continues to touch my heart haha.

Well enough of me being emotional ^_^,
-Sebastian

So in my search for a new phone, I have but one thing to say.

Blackberry 9800.. on AT&T?! Noooooooooooooo

-Sebastian

Goodness. New York City is hella expensive. Especially if you’re doing it right. I went down to NYC with my buddy Sunny and met up with Vanya, his “couple of friends”, Pooja (who’s awesome brother provided the pad), and Megan and her friends.

Honestly, it snowballed to some 14 person monstrosity. It was ridiculous. It was fun. Anyway, things we did included Karaoke in Korea town which was a nice throwback to my past haha. I may talk about this more sometime later, but I’m really tired right now and I have to work on data entry and stuff.

So I’ll leave it at that.
-Sebastian

So around 2:47AM today, (IE when I started this blog post), I pretty much finished testing the backend of the new survey I coded for the School of Management. What’s really cool is that the survey is very much related to one of my favorite shows on television, Lie to Me, which is about a main character named Cal Lightman who’s based on Paul Ekman who’s the guy who created the entire idea of micro-expressions, which is one of the things this survey is testing. So I don’t want to say too much, but micro-expressions are awesome. The idea of a person being able to see how another person is truly thinking/feeling despite their intention to hide it seems like an awesome thing to be able to do. I focus on a lot of decision making aspects of a variety of things. In fact, it’s probably going to be the focus area of whatever major I decide to take. The reason I’m interested in decision making is because I love trying to figure out how people think. Micro-expressions fall in line with these things.

In other news, I’m in desperate need of sleep, but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get it since there’s a BBQ at my house tomorrow and I’m leaving for New York on Saturday. I also have to get this data entry done for the SoM’s 4th of July study… Wow lots of work, but it’s about time I sleep (I have to meet with Andrew in the morning tomorrow).

Oh well life goes on! I’ll sleep when I’m dead? heh.
-Sebastian

So a brief forward would include that the theme for this week in the life of Sebastian Park is lots of work. Be it packing/moving boxes or programming late into the night, it’s been a long week in terms of hours worked. Thankfully, as a result of all this, I’m back in the black after paying off my internet and plane ticket bill. I’m also taking off to New York this weekend to have some fun and go karaoke. I can finally put my ability to rap Eminem’s portion in Forever to use .

So this was last modified 7/5/2009 at 5:41PM (not sure what time zone).

NSLI Korea Part 1

It’s currently 8:30 PM EDT or rather since I’m somewhere over Russia on my way to Incheon, I’d say it’s about 9:30AM at the start of this post. Delta’s moving flight map says that’s about 4 hours and 15 minutes off landing.

so basically, I’ve been sleeping, eating, listening to music, watching movies, and talking to Alan (more on him in a bit) for the past 10 hours.

So what is this part 1? Well, this series of posts will probably take the remaining duration of my summer. I’ll be studying Korean throughout the summer and enjoying my time in my parent’s home country.

So I suppose I should start with some preliminary goals. I REALLY want to be able to fluently read and write Korean (both on the keyboard and by hand). My current level of Korean is very deceptive as while I’m able to understand the majority of Korean I encounter, I lack the distinctive knowledge of being able to read anything with a good amount of speed. Or write anything error-free.

On top of that I want to eliminate the majority of the American acent in my Korean. Sure, it’ll always remain (similar to how my english will probably have a unique flare to it as my accent different syllables), I want to take advantage of the total immersion experience I’ll be experiencing.

Oh, and of course like any adventure, I’m going to have fun! And probably study hard. It’s so strange, I never realized how driven I am to learn and do well in things until very recently. I mean, in the back of my head I had thought it might have been in search of the grade I want, but it isn’t. I just really want to do well in anything I do!

Now for my experience so far. I had a terrible flight from Salt Lake City to Washington DC. I don’t know why, but my head was hurting a great deal at the end of it. It was all fine when I got off though. I joked with a tourist in the area for the 4th of July that I had showed up 5 1/2 months late and was sad that I missed Obama’s inauguration. That said, I only got to see the Congress building and the Washington Memorial from a distance (as the opportunity to visit the sites was cut short on the virtue of the flight in which I’m typing up this blog post).

The first two days were a lot of fun as it presented a non-korea environment to meet with the summer, fall, and year students studying in Korea as well. Man these guys are bright (and by guys, I really mean like 75% girls and 25% guys as that’s the composition of the people in the exchange). First of all… THEY ALL KNOW JAPANESE >> What the heck! I want to learn japanese T_T. I’ve been running by my rudimentary japanese by them and they’ve helped with a few things. Really cool guys. Take Alan (since I said I’ll get to him at the top of the post). He’s headed to Harvard next year and on top of that, he has this extremely diligent vibe about him that is compounded by his knowledge of other exchanges which is really cool).

So beyond the sleeping and meeting of people, the first two days were a preparation and getting to know people before boarding this 14 hour flight. The unknowns coming up? I have NO idea what level korean I should/will be placed in. It’s becoming clear that I’ve blessed to have had a background in Korean, but at the same time I also suffer from the bad life-long habits that new speakers are not plagued with. It’ll all be very interesting.

I’d go into details, but I have two months to talk about the people. Points of interest include Dina and her husband who have been absolutely amazing ^^. Also include in that mix Ed who is a Korean History scholar.

So far on this plane trip, I’ve realized that there is no wifi (sad), unlimited movies (WIN!), and a J-pop station (complete with BoA, Sasuke, GreeeeN, Utada Hikaru and others. I’ve watched Watchmen and Push so far. With now 3 hours and 45 minutes left,

Props: Dina, iEarn, the US Gov’t, Delta Airlines
Flops: Sorry, but a bright green T-shirt wasn’t my idea of something I’d wear on an airplane to South Korea ~_~

-Sebastian (watching a comedy next!)

I’m not editing my posts so I apologize for the grammar.
-Sebastian