KU

Wow. It's been a week since my last post.  I finally took pictures of the school to put up here.  Korea University is one of the most beautiful campuses I've seen (not that I've seen a lot of campuses).  The Gothic style architecture really leaves an impression on a person and the elegance is just breathtaking. 

Here's the Samsung Centennial Building. It has an underground passageway that leads to some plaza in front of the main gate. 

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Here's the President's Building. I love the clouds in this picture. It has the calm after the rain feel.

Here's a closeup of one of the buildings:

I think this is the business building but I'm not too sure:

Outside the campus, it's pretty ghetto though:

On one of my mini expeditions, I walked out of this gate, turned left 2X's and just kept trekkin. It was not pretty.  The houses were really unkept, trash was piled onto tree bases (not in bags I must add), and everything just looked...dirty.  Anyways, back to the cool things on KU's campus.  For all the females out there, this is for you.  In the Dongwan Global Leadership center, first floor to the left, there's a women's lounge.  This thing in the lounge is seriously one of the best ideas out there and they should have one for males as well.  Anyways, here it is:

Confused? They're beds. Lots and lots of beds that girls can just take a nap in or even spend the night after some hardcore studying (like most the students do).  This is called the resting room and it was full when I went but still, such a convenient thing to have on campus considering quite a few people travel over an hour to get here.  Why would students journey over an hour to go to KU?  Because it is prestigious. KU is part of SKY (Seoul National, Korea, and Yonsei Universities) which are the top tiered schools in South Korea.  Getting into one of these schools basically means your life is going to be smooth sailing from then on.  If students go to a lesser school, then most likely they will face discrimination when they enter the workforce.  Education here is VERY important, as in most Confucian societies.  Children have to get into the best middles school, best high schools, best uni's, even good kindergartens.   Every other day, I see a bunch of elementary children running around on campus because they come for tutoring here.  And these children aren't mentally retarded or anything, they're getting tutored to have an advantages when it comes to testing.  Kids in the US don't do that.  Primary school ended at 2:30 (for me at least), and we go home to just be kids.  Here, elementary school children don't stop learning until 5 or 6 o'clock (after school tutoring), and middle/high schoolers don't go home until 10ish because they're studying so much.  This idea just boggled me the first time I heard of it.  My roommate said that her high school friend didn't get accepted into KU and instead of going to another university, she's studying for another year to take the entrance exam (not working, studying).  Not many people would do that in the US but educational pressure here is staggering.  I'm kinda glad I didn't grow up in an Asian country due to that fact.  I'd probably be so stressed if I had to go through the schooling here...