Meeting Sun-ah and King Sejong

This Sunday I met up with Sun-ah, a friend from last time I was in Korea. She is preparing for the civil service entrance exams and stays at her grandfathers house which is outside of Seoul so she can study without distractions (maybe I should try that too). This weekend she came to Seoul though and we could finally meet up. She picked me up by car close to the dormitory and we first went to have lunch and some coffee at the next subway station. Then we decided to go to Gwanghwamun, the area around Gyeongbokgung Palace and the Blue House (the residence of the president is called Blue House in Korea...hehe so not quite American but similar). We did some book shopping in a huge Kyobo bookstore because I had run out of books and then we went to a museum about King Sejong the Great and Hangeul, the Korean writing system. King Sejong reigned during the 15th century and in this time invented the ingenious Korean alphabet.
Outside the museum is a big statue of the King and we took some pictures together with him:

The Great King and us

The museum was really cute and you could do a lot of hands-on stuff, like taking a picture on a replica of the royal throne. Felt good but could have been a little bit more comfortable:

Don't I look like a good king...uh...queen?

I also learned something really amazing that day: apparently there exists a language called Cia-Cia which is spoken in parts of an island close to Indonesia. Because they didn't have an adequate writing system though they started a pilot project in 2009 to consider writing their language in Hangeul, the Korean script because apparently Hangeul can express Cia-Cia very adequately in writing. There is also a textbook which teaches Cia-Cia via Hangeul. This was all very new to me and I thought this was really interesting! You can read a little bit more about the whole story here.
Since a lot of the museum was about Hangeul they even had benches shaped like Korean syllables.

I'm sitting on "ha"

I also learned how to make an origami crane which is so much more complicated than I always thought it is. My friend told me that all Korean children learn this in school and they could even take origami as a extracurricular subject.

Before going back to Hanyang University by subway we had a small dinner together. Mine consisted of rice mixed with vegetables covered with fried tofu.

I'm going to bed now because it is already really late here and I have to get up early tomorrow (like every day :(  I hope I dream about a pigsty!
why?
well, Koreans believe, that if you dream at night about a pig, you will have a lot of good luck!