GSU Membership Training

So called MTs (Membership Trainings) are quite popular among Koreans. A group of people, usually belonging to a certain network (like freshmen of a certain department, members of a student club, etc) rent a place somewhere in the countryside and go there over the weekend to bond and drink alcohol (or maybe the other way round, to drink alcohol and bond). So if you are going on an MT be prepared to drink (a lot!). If you don't want to drink or just drink a little bit, I guess it's better to just stay at home straight away.
On Saturday around 80 people (half Korean, half exchange students from all over the world) left from Hanyang University to attend the membership training of GSU (Global Student Union). We were asked to be at the student union building at 10:30 but we didn't actually leave before 12, which was really stupid because I would have liked soooooooooooooo much to sleep a little bit longer. I'm always tired as you probably already know by now ;)
On the way to a secluded spot outside of Seoul by bus (and by secluded I mean really secluded! there was nothing around our house, except another house for MTs ;) I guess they do that to not get any complaints about noise and so on), we stopped at a place to make traditional Korean masks. You get a mask-shaped cardboard piece and different colored modeling-clay and then you can start working. It is supposed to either look really scary (so all the bad demons get scared away) or really funny (so the demons laugh so much that they can't attack you).

Mine looks like this:

My mask...do you think it's scary?

I hang it over my desk so it can watch me studying...hehe, quite some motivation ;)

Mask-making in progress 1

Mask-making in progress 2

One of the Korean girls at my table made a really cute one! Don't know whether it can help scare away the demons though ;)

Cutest traditional Korean mask ever

After arriving and settling at our house we had a Korean food cooking contest. Three teams prepared traditional Korean foods which were then rated by the president and vice-president of GSU.
My team prepared some kind of Korean pancake/pizza which doesn't taste like pancake/pizza at all though. You basically mix up flour, water, salt, egg, spring onion, normal onion, octopus (yuck) and kimchi (traditional spicy pickled Korean cabbage). We made some without octopus though, which I was quite happy about.

Our ingredients

Full action cooking

Our team got second place in the cooking contest and after cleaning up we played a couple of funny games. At the end we had a big balloon fight, where you tie a balloon to your ankle and then the members of both teams have 30 seconds to destroy as many balloons of the other team as possible. The team with most balloons left after 30 seconds wins. My team won both times ;)
Afterwards we were all really hungry so we had Korean barbecue outside and after eating the real party started! It was a lot of fun, but sleeping arrangements were really uncomfortable. We were all sleeping on the floor and since we were too many people the rooms were really crowded. We had two small rooms for the guys, one small room for the girls and one huge common room for everyone where the party was being held. The floor was heated which was really comfortable at the beginning but after some time it was really too hot. When I came back to the dorm on Sunday afternoon, the first thing I did, as you might guess, was taking a long nap! But then there was also Korean homework to attend to of course...