So I found myself on the other side of the hagwon divide: I'm now officially taking a class to help me with my Korean. It's at a little school in Seoul's Gangnam district, and happens Saturday afternoons, which makes it compatible with my schedule – the main reason I chose the program, despite the long trip to get there: a little over an hour on the subway.
The class is well-suited to my ability level, I think. I'm a little ahead of the curve on grammar and verb conjugation stuff, but behind the curve on vocabulary, definitely. Which is typical of my language-learning experiences, I suppose.
Gangnam is a very trendy area "south of the river" (which is basically what the name means). After my class I walked along Teheran-ro, one of the few streets in Seoul that everyone seems to know the name of (perhaps because it's a foreign name?), and the address of a lot of trendy and high-rent stores, among other things. After that, I took a round-about ride on the green line of the subway around the east side, across the river (where the train goes on a bridge) and saw a fabulous just-after-sunset rose-colored sky, with all the bridges and broad avenues along the banks with elegant high-rise apartments, random modernist arches, fall-colored orange and gold trees. But the Youngpoong bookstore didn't have the latest Economist magazine yet. So I came home on a crowded train, and bought some cabbage and delicious cherry tomatoes at the high-rent grocery in the basement of the Lotte on my way out of the Jeongbalsan subway station, and walked home in the cold wind while a drunk couple argued lovingly in the middle of the street.
