벚꽃잎에 맞다

It feels like early summer this week but yet we get to see and smell all the spring flowers. With spring flowers blooming and a comfortable early summer weather, I doubt there is better combination.

Cherry blossoms are withering away with greater intensity today. Petals are felling and dancing in the air like heavy snow. When a gust of wind blows over a road covered with petals, they are again lifted and sweep through the road like waves and eddies. Cherry blossoms are just simply beautiful from start to end despite its short period of existence.

Thanks to our Japanese classmate, we got to taste cherry blossom tea this morning. As explained by her, it is a Japanese custom to drink this tea during wedding ceremony. The tea has a mild fragrant of cherry blossom but tasted salty because of the salt used, probably as a preservative.

Cherry blossom tea looks better than it tastes but I still like it.

Class started today with our professor giving us a pep talk on learning. She didn't start with the methods but instead she worked on our mind. I like her story about a lowly-educated farmer whose 3 sons graduated from the top university in Korea - Seoul National University. When interviewed, the farmer said human's mind is like a piece of land. Soil needs to be ploughed and softened before the planting season starts and so is mind. What he did was to make his sons study a year of textbooks in advance. His intention was to let them find out what they know and what they do not, so that by the following year, they will have the chance to clarify their doubts with their teachers. No seedlings can grow well on a hardened soil and similarly, no knowledge can grow on "hardened" mind. Fail to prepare and be prepared to fail.

Outdoor group discussion on essay writing at an open-air amphitheatre.

Since the weather was good today, we had a compromise. We chose to do our group discussion on essay writing at an open-air amphitheatre.

I like what I had learnt. No essay in this world is original because everyone is copying from someone else. The essay that we write is, more often than not, a confluence of others' writing and our own thought. So there is no need to feel ashame if we are to take a chunk from others' work and uses it as our own.

I was kinda enlightened when our professor said, "You are not writing an essay for the sake of showing your language proficiency. You are writing to convey your thought and everyone has a lot of thoughts. In essay, what is more important is the clear conveyance of thoughts and not being grammatically correct. I think I have less stress writing in Korean now.

In good weather, people can get a bit crazy like dumping their friend into water.

The rest of my day was spent on study admistration and I completed my day sitting by the fountain garden in my campus. Its Good Friday today but surprisingly, it is not a holiday here. Despite that, it feels like a holiday.

Pigeon and dove feeding on the lawn beside the fountain.

Staying beautiful right to the end despite its brief existence.