And So It Ends

Posted: May 15, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Bed-Knob and Broomstick | Leave a comment

Well folks, the unthinkable has happened. Since my last correspondence with club live, I had been patiently waiting for an email confirmation that my zune had shipped; I never received such an email.

Apparently, that did not deter Live Search Club from sending it out anyways. My parents were confused when a package arrived for me a few days ago. They sent it home with Besta, and Besta tried to get a hold of me.

Sadly, I was at a LSAT prep class when they called. Happily, Roni was able to get the message. When I came home from my class, Roni said that Besta wanted us to go to their place. She did not allude as to the reason. I was very surprised, relieved, and happy to discover a package shipped from Live Search Club!

After nearly 8 months of waiting, I was finally able to get the zune. And my verdict? I’ve decided to keep it. Despite being made by microsoft, it is actually a pretty cool little mp3 player. I really like that they allowed me to update to the latest firmware without having to pay. I don’t have a very big music collection, and so 30 GB is more than enough space to store pretty much all of my music. I guess it wasn’t a scam after all!

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I'm a Winner!

Posted: May 15, 2008 | Author: | Filed under: Romgi the Enigma | Leave a comment

Every year (for the past 21 years) the BYU Korean Language and Culture Club hosts a Korean speech contest. It usually happens during the winter semester. For two years, I have tried to enter into the contest. I have always found out about the contest after the deadline. This year, however, I was able to submit a speech in time for the contest.

There are quite a few native Koreans here at BYU, so they do have rules about who can enter teh contest. You can’t be a native Korean speaker, and there are different categories that depend on the length of time the language has been studied. I entered the advanced division, which is basically the one for returned missionaries. The prizes vary from year to year, and have ranged from a trip to Korea to gift certificates at a local Korean restaurant.

The topics are supposed to be about some aspect of Korean culture, whether it be food, history, language or anything in between. My speech was about a possible relation between an alphabetic script written during the Yuan Dynasty in China and the Korean alphabet, written 200 years later (I know most of you are thinking, “wow… really interesting stuff there Romgi…”). You don’t have to memorize the speech, but you kind of get bonus points if you do.

Speaking of points, each speech is rated by the judges based on content, relevance, difficulty of vocabulary, correct use of vocabulary, pronunciation and intonation (there may be some other categories… I’m not really sure).

So I memorized my speech, and I won! This happened almost a month ago, so you might be asking yourself why I am writing about it now. Provo has a fairly well established Korean community, and they have a newspaper that is published monthly. I am in the paper, as it talks about the speech contest. The girl Roni tutors is the girl who wrote the article. If anybody wants a translation of the article, just say so in the comments and I’ll post a translation.