Week1 paragraph-200601302 EunJi Bahk

SC200601302 EunJi Bahk

A person that I admire

        I have been extremely busy for the last two weeks with several kinds. First of all my final exams are all done, which is nice even though the summer session started as soon as I finished handing in all final papers. Secondly I have been jumping around this city, Seoul with my 12 Swedish friends staying here for some projects and most of them haven't been here before, so they want me to spend time as a "tour guide" with them as much as I can.

        One of the 12 people, Patrik is my closest friend since he was a transfer student of KAIST and always told me he is not so much like Korea as love Korea. I barely meet him either as he went back to Stockholm last year, so this has been amazingly nice.

        When you have someone who visit your city, you are really inclined to do some touristic adventures that you might not have done before. The first week however, we didn't have so much fun as I had seven exams when they came. On Saturday we went to some tour sites such as Namsan Tower, Cheongwadae, Gyengbokgung and even Sejong city in Daejun and Songdo city in Incheon for their project. But the everyday schedules were always end up with a lot of bottle of beer as we usually went to some Korean barbecue restaurant and had a long conversation.

        Since he had been here for quite a long time, we had a good talk about differences of culture between Sweden and Korea. When I face a new culture or cultural differences, I am firstly focused on thinking how much strange it is. Unlike me, Patrik said instead of being confused or offended he thinks how well he know his own Swedish culture and how much one takes for granted. Swedish people often think about their own culture as very little distinctive characteristic and traditions but the truth is they are just not used to talk about those topics according to him.