Campus

We'll begin with a quick tour of some parts of campus.

There is a small, 'Western-style' restaurant in the dorm building I'm in, that opens up to the campus. The place as a whole, while probably pretty reasonable in the West, is a bit pricey compared to the competition here ($5-6/meal, yeesh), so I generally eat elsewhere. If it's a soggy and cold day, though, I sometimes have spaghetti there (which is very good) whilst watching the rain. It's a popular place on campus, for the Korean students as well as the International kiddies.

We'll proceed up the road from there - going down it (the direction of this picture) leads to the main road in front of Yonsei, and that can be followed into Sinchon (SHIN-chon) proper. On the right in this picture is Yonsei's Korean Language Institute (KLI). I hoped to take a course there, but schedule constraints did that in.

Just up the hill from my dorm is the New Millennium Hall, which houses the English-speaking graduate school at Yonsei (there's other grad programs, this is just the only on in English), as well as the Foreign Language Institute (FLI), which teaches English, French, Spanish, and Chinese, and possibly a number of other languages. I even saw a Esperanza club here.

For all intends and purposes, however, it's mainly English - everyone here wants to know English, and everyone here wants to go to America (for grad school, and for living if they were offered a job there).

It's a pretty nice building.

From here we go up a path that will lead to much of the rest of campus. The view looking up the path is, in fact, quite boring (some road and an intersection), so here we get the much nicer view down the path, walking backwards. No lasting injuries resulted from walking up this hill backwards.

Thereafter, there's a very short (1-2 min.) walk through a woodsy path to get to the rest of campus (you can walk on sidewalks, but cutting through the small park is easier). Plant-life here does not like to waste space, and probably swallows small children who get lost in it whole, but is very scenic from the paths. That said, if I'd been sent by the army to fight in the Korean War I'd have taken one step off the boat, seen this, and switched to the Navy.

This is the view of Daewoo Main Hall, which is where the Economics and Business courses take place. It's visible from the park-ish/nature-y preserve en route to the rest of campus, towards the top of the short trail.

One part of the trail tops off at the top of the stadium there (I don't know what they use it for yet)...this is a view of a few of the other campus buildings from there. They're really not all shrouded in forest, there's a main road and sidewalks and such, it's just not visible from here. The campus backs up to a small mountain, so there is a lot of forest there.

Here's another view from the same spot, looking out a bit towards the city. You may note the wonderfully picturesque crane in the background - the city's under a lot of construction, but that seems to be the norm. Seoul itself is bisected by the Han River, and apparently a new bridge is built over it about once every two years (nothing's wrong with the old ones - but 1/4 of the population lives in Seoul, 1/2 if you count the outer-areas...so more bridges seem to be in demand).

Once we're over the path to the rest of campus, we may find the actual Daewoo Main Hall. Then again, we may not, if we happen to be Andrew on his first day of classes.
(I know, I know...you'd think it would be hard to miss...)

Walking back down campus a bit we find the administration building, which is one of the oldest buildings on campus. I doubt it's from the original school (few to no buildings in Seoul survived the Korean War), but it's still rather elderly. Yonsei itself was started by a ____ Underwood, who was a Christian missionary here back in the day. His statue is behind the clump of trees in the middle, and its profile is on most of the major banners on campus.

Walking down the main campus drive after that, one might see a variety of trees, people, and in the distance, a city.

The campus is well-manicured - the first week there were service-peoples everywhere, trimming, cutting, hand-weeding the lawns, etc. Yonsei is apparently one of the SKY schools, the top 3 in Korea ('Y' = Yonsei). I feel a bit bad talking to the students about how hellish the experience of getting in was (the high schools had cots, so the students could sleep there instead of wasting time commuting home when they finished studying at 11, etc.) when I just had to fill out a few sheets to get here for a semester. On the plus side, the students are pretty much the brightest Korea has to offer.

And here's a kind of cool tree, which I pass occasionally. In the background is the paved area in front of one of the buildings - students sometimes set up a net between two chairs and pass a soccer ball over it after hours there.

A little bit more of the main road...the blue banners everywhere are announcing Yonsei's Nobel Forum, where they bring in 6 Nobel Prize winners to talk on a subject.

This is half of the Engineering Building. More to the point, and far more cool-ley, this is a picture of a bridge from the 3rd/4th floor of the Engineering Building to an adjacent building, which (if the shot were closer you'd see) is a two-story bridge at some parts, which includes a small study lounge on the lower level.

This is a better picture of the Engineering Building proper, near the front of Yonsei. It goes about twice as far back as you'd think a building of its dimensions should. Oh, and there's a nifty little bush in the foreground. And a blue thing, the purpose of which is to appear in pictures of the Engineering Building, I'm told.

Flowers. I'd bet they commemorate something, or are there for some kind of reason.

(No, I'm not too lazy to figure it out - all the signs in front of them are in Korean. Next time I walk past with someone who speaks English, I'll ask.)

A perfectly orange-red traffic cone. Also the view from the front-gate of campus, across the many lanes of traffic which span the road in front of it. If you can see under the bridge, it leads straight down into Sinchon proper, and the subway station that leads from there onwards.

I still haven't quite figured out what laws regarding emergency vehicles are... They have sirens and all, but sometimes the traffic heeds them and sometimes it doesn't.

That concludes the Yonsei University tour for now. I missed a few things (medical complex, student union, library, view from outside, etc. come to mind), so maybe there'll be a follow-up post with a few more pictures.

Any requests or clarifications can be made through the ever-so-clever little "Comments" section below.

That is quite all! For now!