Day 13: First day of school

Ooooooohmygosh what a day.
Alright hang on.

So the first thing we did in the morning was to update our information on 'Danskerlisten' (a list made by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark to keep track of Danes staying abroad).
It's no secret that there's a bit of tension between North Korea and the western world right now after the news of them 'testing their hydrogen bombs' surfaced and I guess it bugged Celine a little. I mean, it bothers me too, there's just nothing we can do about it right now, right?

Also, today was our first day of school and as you can see, we only had Korean class today.
Class started at 16 (4pm) and we were informed which level we'd been placed into at 15 (3pm).

But let's start off talking about the first half of today which was actually good, shall we?

Yesterday when I was out with Jake, I held his money and apartment card in my bag. I forgot to give the card back to him so we made plans to meet up in Sinchon for lunch today before my class.

Jake thinks he looks 'horrible and squashed' in these pictures. I think he looks good as ever!

As soon as we got outside the café, my phone connected to the wifi and I got a message from Celine saying that we'd been placed into lvl 2...
Our university in Denmark expected us to be in lvl 4 or at least get into lvl 3 and be moved up into lvl 4. But lvl 2? There was no way..

Jake knew I was waiting for the result and saw my reaction. OHhhhhmygosh it was so embarrassing!
I took it pretty chill in that moment but I suppose it was still bad enough for Jake to encourage me. He walked with me from Sinchon back to the KLI building in front of my dorm where Celine and I would be taking our first class.

Those were some of the longest two hours ever.
We felt so misplaced and were extremely disappointed with ourselves.

Everything was too easy. The grammar we learned was something we had already learned a long time ago.

Since it was first day of school and no one had known which level they would get into before an hour before class, most of us didn't have books yet. The teacher gave us a 10-minute break to run down and buy them. Celine and I, determined that we didn't belong there, just stayed. There was another girl as well, who felt like she didn't belong there either and together we all talked to the teacher and asked her if we could move up a level. She told us that after class we could all go to the office.

For a moment the dark skies over our heads cleared and Celine pointed out the little drawings in front of us below the blackboard.

She had to get a close up picture

A few minutes before class ended, we both got a mail from the Danish Embassy in Korea. It was saying the exact same thing as their Facebook update that was posted an hour later or so.

In short it said that, for now, they regarded the security situation in South Korea as unchanged but that they of course kept an eye out for anything that could potentially change this.

So that's good at least. Still it made me think a bit more about why we were here and what to do in case anything were to happen. It was weird having these thoughts.

Once class finished, we hurried to the office where several other students were standing in line, waiting to change their level as well. Our teacher came out and told us that there was absolutely no way we could be moved up to level 4. She went back in a few more times but to no avail. We tried telling her that it was expected by our own university in Denmark that we got into level 4 and she replied that we should talk to our teacher in Denmark and then with the reading teacher we were going to meet the next day. Alright.

We went straight back to our room after that and let all our anger and disappointment out.

The feeling of not being 'good enough,' along with the sudden stress of having to make our own syllabus and taking an extra exam once we returned to Denmark, was strong.

We let out some really desperate and whimpering noises and jumped into each of our own beds. Celine got annoyed at her boyfriend for being sweet and supportive of her in the moment and starting kicking the air in anger. We started questioning our plants even,

Once we'd calmed down a bit, Celine jumped into my bed and we wrote a desperate mail to our teacher, Karin, asking what was to happen to us now.

Were we going to be sent home?

Would our school ask us to pay back the scholarship we got?

After writing the mail, we went back to each of our beds.

I was really upset and messaged Philip, who, as always, could calm me down ♡

I don't know what I would do without him

Celine and I spent a couple more hours in silence until late that evening when he called me again.

It gave me a bit more hope for the next day~