February is about to end. Spring is approaching. Birds have started to come by. There is hardly any snow on the sidewalks and the snows have melted into drizzles and tiny raindrops.
Cathianne wakes up to the sound of her 8:00AM alarm. She realizes she has a roommate, and this roommate, she still has to meet. She gets up and makes her bed. As her roommate comes out of the bathroom, she introduces herself. She feels a warm welcome from a seemingly shy but nice new roommate. Or rather, it’s the other way around. She’s the new roommate of her roommate.
Penny is the name of her roommate and seems to be eager to make friends with her. Unfortunately, Penny hardly speaks or understands English. This is a great challenge for Cathianne. Now she really needs to hasten her Hangeul lessons in order to communicate well with her new friend. So hanging in there, Cathianne hopes soon that they will be able to talk more.
As Cathianne finished her morning routine, she heads down to the laboratory and upon her entry, no one was there. A few minutes after, she heard someone enter but she was busy learning Hangeul on the internet with her earphones on. Gil oppa greeted her as he passed behind her seat. Everything seemed to look busy for Gil oppa as he started typing on his keyboard. In a short while, some of the labmates have arrived while she was busy burying her ears in the lessons she’s becoming more eager in learning. Too busy to mind the noise, she got shocked when suddenly MJ oppa’s head popped on her side to say hello to her. *laughs*
Cathianne has been learning how to speak several phrases and has been practicing how to write the characters and even typing them in the computer. She’s been enjoying these new findings. It was approaching lunch but no one seems to be hungry. Her stomach is starting to grumble but she decides to leave it alone as for sure, one of the labmates would call her to join them for lunch. While keeping herself busy learning, she was once again surprised by another oppa, Kimp, who suddenly greeted her just behind her head to see how she’s been doing. At that she responded with a chuckle and showed him the lessons she’s been trying to learn online. He’s making brewed coffee again. She remembers that he was also the one who made brewed coffee and the first person she saw using the coffee brewer. He must probably the only person not lazy enough to use the coffee brewer. Hah.
MJ oppa finally asked Cathianne if she was hungry and without a doubt, she said yes. So they went to eat lunch together at the cafeteria behind Coffee Bean where they had their first lunch when she first arrived in Korea. At that, she finally remembered how to use the vendo machine in order to get the food stub. For 3,000KRW, they each had rice, several sidings, the never ending kimchi and a bowl of “bin” (if that’s how it is correctly pronounced) to warm the belly. This time, she almost finished everything. Lunch is definitely the perfect time for her to fill up her stomach. Last night’s dinner was too good but she simply has a small appetite for any evening meal though.
Back at the lab, she pursued her lessons online. At almost 5:00PM, Prof. JY called her to his office in order to discuss her tasks for the semester. After having confirmed all that has to be done, she’s finally been given a project to start reading on. Hoping she does well, she listens to the professor intently and prays that God will help her in understanding the project particularly the derivation of all the equations that were shown to her. It’s been a long while since she last had encounters with the “curves” and “snake-like writings” on equations and she admits to herself she’s not a big fan of integration. But this time, she has to be braver in facing these “cobras” as this will be her foundation in building up her future researches and eventually, her thesis.
It was already 7:00PM and Prof. JY dismisses her. She returns to the lab and reads on it. She decides to also finish whatever document submission she can and set the schedules of her submission. MJ oppa then asked if she was busy and invited her to join them for dinner. So up she got and went with MJ oppa, Kiko oppa, and John, the youngest one who was always bullied by being dared to speak to her in English. It was drizzling outside so Juan they had to get them umbrellas for protection. To the familiar road they walked to where the restaurants were. This time, they brought her to the place that served kimchi fried rice. The restaurant was on a cozy place where one has to go up along the small, almost slippery, cemented stairway that led them to what seemed to be a house-turned-into-kitchen with a huge living area. A TV was open and it showed an American movie that starred familiar faces for Cathianne. She’d be glad to watch but was too hungry to be bothered. The food didn’t take long to arrive and whoa! There goes another huge serving of fried rice. She took her android out and took a picture of her food and Kiko oppa teased Juan by taking his own food for Cathianne to take a snapshot of. The three had each a bowl of kimchi fried rice with tuna and egg while Cathianne had almost the same but with a bit lesser servings and without the tuna. The dishes again came with several sidings like the kimchi, the yellow round sweet radish (that up to now, she’s still not one hundred percent sure if that really was radish even if she has eaten it several times), more sidings she can’t name, and a bowl of spicy noodles with sticky something that tasted like the familiar rice-made sticky meals eaten for breakfast or meryenda in the Philippines. Before they left, she paid 4,000KRW for the hearty, overly-full meal that she still can’t fathom as to how she can ever finish one for the future dinners she’ll be having with them.
Back to the lab they walked as she tried to practice Hangeul in vain. *laughs* They still can’t get what she was trying to say when all she wanted was to practice saying “this is ---“.
After more readings in the lab, Cathianne finally ends her day by going back to her dormitory by 10:00PM. Looking forward to the National Holidays and she hopes to buy herself a good dictionary and the things she need to help her better work things out in her dorm room.
