Home coming day

Saturday was homecoming day. Some of our friends who already graduated came to school to see us. It had been such a long time since I saw them. I was really glad to see them again. We enjoyed several glasses of beer having pleasant chats together. Most of them work in the other provinces away from Busan now, so it's not easy to see them often. Some friends left early and the rest of us had another drink. We were going to say good-bye after that, but we felt sorry about it, so we decided to stay over night in a karaoke room. We sang songs for over three hours. We were dismissed at about four a.m. I got home by taxi and went to bed right away. When I woke up, it was eleven thirty. I felt a bit tired, but it was such a good gathering. I'm already missing them. Hopefully, I also have a job when I see them again.

The end of year

I feel that time really flies especially when I look back on the past time. It feels like 2009 has started yesterday, but this year is almost over. It is already the end of November. There is the Korean movie, "2009- Lost Memories". I saw that movie in 2002 when I was a 3rd year of high school student. 2009 was 7 years later than that time, so it felt like it was fairly long future. I vaguely thought I might have a job and be married in 2009 at that time. Reality is quite different, though. I'm still a student and not sure when I'll get a job. I usually feel regret for something that I have not done even though I should have done at the end of every year. Then I make a new plan for the next year, reflecting the thing I haven't fully done this year. It's almost time to make a new plan and refresh myself.

Wearing braces

I started wearing braces at the beginning of August. One day, I felt that my teeth looked so crooked and ugly in the mirror. It was shortly after I pulled my last wisdom tooth out. I became really eager to straighten my crooked teeth, so I suddenly decided to wear braces. My mother strongly disagreed with my idea, though. It was because I was supposed to pull out four small molar teeth to do that. She didn't accept the fact that I had to pull four normal molar teeth out. I managed to persuade her in a week and got a permission, so I began to wear braces at last. It was very painful to set the braces around my teeth. I could hardly eat anything at first. After having a meal, it usually takes me more that ten minutes to brush my teeth. You can guess why. I'm getting used to it. It's true that it's very inconvenient to wear braces, though, especially when eating and talking. It's not as painful as before, but pain has started again because I went to see an orthodontist a few hours ago and he tightened the braces more than before. (I go to see an orthodontist every three weeks.) He said it will take about 3 years to finish straightening my teeth when I started wearing braces. It's around July, 2012. I'll look forward to that day.

Time machine

What if I can get time back with what I know at the moment? Sometimes, I wish like that. Now, I really want to go back to the time right before taking the teacher's exam. I'll be able to get all the answers correct then. If there exists time machine, when do you go back to? There were a lot of moments that I wanted to go back to. When I was fifth grade, I had a crush on the girl in the same class for the first time, but I was too shy to ask her out. I often thought I would have asked her out if I had been able to go back to that moment. Oh, don't get me wrong. I mean I just loved her when I was young. I don't love her any more, ha ha. She is just my friend now. The idea of time machine is just off the top of my head because I regret not studying for the exam as best as I could. Come to think of it, thinking about time machine might have something to do with regretting something. Of course, it might not be true if we want to travel into our future. Anyway, I don't want to regret something anymore..

How do you relieve your stress?

Many people get stress for a lot of different reasons. I'm getting stress because of the study for the teacher's exam nowadays. I usually listen to music to get the stress away, but it doesn't always work. Then I try to see something in a different way, more positively if it is what gives me stress. However, it doesn't work all the time either. The stress tends to go down as time goes by, but is there any effective way to relieve the stress very quickly? It might be a temporary solution if the main source of the stress still exists. Nevertheless, this kind of solution still helps me to refresh myself, so I can face the problem more energetically. How do you get your stress away?

With graduation just around the corner

This is already my last semester in university. It means that my university life is almost over. I can't believe I'm a senior now. Time really flies. I still remember when I was 20. I was a freshman and everything seemed new to me. I felt like I could do anything at that time. Maybe it was because I always had some kind of freedom in my mind and I actually had a lot of spare time then. I lost that kind of freedom, though. Since I came back to Korea from Australia, I think I've been leading so busy life especially doing a lot of school works. I always had to worry about grades after taking the exams and take care of lots of assignments to catch up on. Now, I'm likely to manage to meet the GPA for the early graduation, so I can take the teacher's exam next month, but I'm afraid I've recently got too much stress because of all those things. I'm kind of tired now. I can't single out one thing exactly, but I had many things that I wanted to do before I graduate. I'm running out of time and I have to focus on studying for the teacher's exam for now. I just feel gloomy nowaday. I need to get a life!

What are friends for?

We've been meeting a lot of people as we live. We usually meet our parents and siblings at first. As we grow up, we meet a lot of friends in the neighborhood or in the school. Not all the people we meet become our friends, though. As I mentioned before, people have many different types of personalities. Some people are so easy to go on conversations with that it's possible to talk to each other all day if both have enough time. Why is that? It might be because both people have lots of common topics. Or they might have similar style of personality. The way of their thinking might be almost the same. In contrast, I feel that some people are not that easy to talk about. They seem to have very different way of thinking, so they usually don't support what I say and don't understand how I feel in the certain situation. What kind of person do you prefer to make as a friend? I prefer the former, actually. I would tell my concern to the former and get some comfort from them rather than telling it to the latter who might think I'm stupid because I have such a concern which is not worth worrying about for them.

However, that kind of people are also good friends. They just have a different point of view, which does not mean that they hate me. They often help me to see myself in another perspective so as not to become self-righteous. Nobody wants to hear something bad about oneself, but friends indeed might be the people who are willing to say their friends' faults to their friends franky. To be honest, I really don't like to hear something bad about me, but I think I need to be more generous about candid advice.

Personality

People are different from each other in terms of a lot of things. I think that especially the personality each person has is very diverse. It is also not that easy to exactly define someone's personality in one word because there still exist lots of different figures of it inside individuals. I think we ourselves don't recognize all the personalities we have. Some people say that a person's appearance fully reflects his or her personality, so the first impression is very important. I partly support this point, but I don't think it is completely right. Of course, I also have been judging somebody by his or her appearance and facial expression at first. I know it's kind of prejudice, but it's really hard to get over. When I see some guy who usually frowns his face, I'm likely to consider him not a very nice guy even though I really don't know him. However, I often find out that he is actually a really nice person once I get closed to him. The better I get to know him, the more I can find his different personalities. I think judging somebody by his appearance or just one apparent personality might be wrong. Let's find out our friends' another attractions that even he or she doesn't recognize yet.

Q. What is the difference between character and personality?

Another myself

The reason why I talked about the clones, all of sudden, the other day was to let you know that I have an identical twin brother as well as the movie 'The Island' is awesome. Of course, he is not my clone, but you know we have the completely same gene. We can even transplant our organs to each other without any rejection. I definitely hope that kind of situation never ever happens to us, though! He and I attended the same elementary school, middle school, high school, and even the same university. We've always been together since we were born. Some of my friends usually say that my twin brother looks much better than me, which I don't accept, but we looked more alike when we both were young. Whenever we walked along the street, people often stared at us as if they saw something mysterious. Every new semester, the teachers got confused with who was who. When we became the fourth grade, we were assigned to the same class. We didn't know many friends at the first day of the new semester, so we couldn't help sitting together. Our friends got surprised to see us and didn't look off from us. According to my mother's request, we got separated into the other classes the next day, but we already got pretty famous in the school since that day. We made a lot of friends because he made his friends in his class and I made my friends in my class. Then, his friends and my friends became our friends because we always hung out together. Our friends often joked asking why we were looking in the mirror whenever we talked to each other face to face. In contrast to American culture, we should call a sibling's name with respect in Korea if he or she is older than us, but I just call his name only even though he was born 2 minutes earlier than me. Actually, I rather consider him as my closest friend than an older brother. We've been spending lots of time doing the same things together. we share any secret or anxiety with each other that we can't tell anybody. We are willing to give advices about it. Since we entered the university, he has been going out with his girlfriend for over 6 years. He tries to have more time with his girlfriend, so I often get jealous of them, but I believe I'm quite used to it now. We are busy doing each other's own things now, so we can't spend as much time together as we did. We quarreled a lot when we were young. We still fight with each other due to something insignificant, but we understand each other's mind better than any other person. (His girlfriend may understand him better than me..;;) He is one of the most precious people and will always be in my entire life. I'd like to thank him for being my twin brother.
I apologize to the people, who got confused by us, for causing some inconvenience:P

Quiz. Which one is me in the pictures?

The Island

Everybody might have imagined at least once how it would be if there existed the identical people as themselves. I recently saw the movie 'The Island' on TV by chance. I was just taking a break on sofa when I just turned on the TV, in which the movie was on. There live a lot of clones, who were created only for the original people's requests, in the unknown space. The clones are supposed to believe they were saved from the contaminated earth. Their only hopes are going to the island which is considered as an ideal world among them. One of the clones wonders about everything going on around him and doubts about the existence of the island..

I'm not going to say the whole story about it for the people who didn't see it yet. I strongly recommend this movie to everybody. It's really cool!

Something about myself

Thank you for visiting my personal blog! I don't know what I should write for the first post in my blog. It might sound boring, but I think you guys need to know about me just a little bit at least as long as you are visiting my blog. So, let me briefly introduce myself to you guys first. My name is Kang Hae-Joong. I'm 24 years old in an international age. Of course, I'm 25 in Korean age. Many people from other countries who don't know about Korean culture wonder what a Korean age is. I went to Australia with working holiday visa on 13 April 2007. I had lived in Brisbane city for eight and half months and had traveled around Australia for a month. I made lots of international friends over there. I explained about the concept of Korean age to many of my international friends whenever I first met them in Australia. You guys all know that we consider that we were already one year old as soon as we were born and we get one year older at the turning point of that year. In contrast, people from other countries consider that they became one year old when it was one year after their birthday. They were quite interested in this difference. I had worked in the hotel called the Sebel&Citigate King George Square Brisbane as a food&beverage attendant for six months. It was my first time to get a weekly payment. I'm not sure how I got a job there. I had no working experience in hotel. All I got was just confidence. I was very desperate for a job at that time. The job interview was also quite challenging, but I emphasized that I used to work with American soldiers, so I would not have any big problem working there as well. I might seem very strange to the managers, but it worked anyway. Of course, it was very hard to do my job at first because it was my very first time to work as a kind of waiter in the hotel. I was clumsy about everything, but I got used to my job before long. I made some Australian friends there. I still keep in touch with them through facebook. I'm really missing them. It's been already over one year since I came back to Korea. It's a shame that my English speaking skills are getting worse and worse. I have fewer chances to speak English nowadays. Now, I even feel nervous when I speak English. Anyway, it seems obvious that I had such a great time in Australia. I had a lot of freedom over there, but I'm afraid my life is too tight in Korea. Everytime I feel gloomy, I think about the good old days I had in Australia. It feels like Australia is my second hometown. That's the place where I always want to go back to someday. I'm missing all the friends I met there. I'm getting a lot of stress studying for the teacher's exam now. To be honest, I'm not ready to take it at all. I'll do my best for the rest of the time and try my luck, though. As some of you know, I have two brothers. One is my big brother, and the other is my identical twin brother. There are lots of episodes related to my being twin, but it will take ages to talk about it now. I'll tell you guys these stories next time. I need to get some sleep now. That's all for my introduction for today. See you around:)