Yesterday we made back to the original hotel we were in the first time we were in Seoul. I missed the breakfast here. However, I think the eggs gave Noah food poisoning for four days, so I didn’t eat those. Then we headed to Topis. 

Topis headquarters is back at city hall. It was nice to be somewhere where we already knew. Then a Topis tour guide took us to the basement. At the basement we watched an information video about Topis. Topis is like the traffic control of Seoul. They track the cars, public buses, and subways. They can reroute the cars if there is an accident and use the information gathered to find better patterns and routes for public transportation. They also have camera everywhere in the city to check for illegal parked cars or cars over a certain gas emission. Those cameras were good those like they could spy on people. It was top notch surveillance that I didn’t know was going on! So that is kind of scary and brings in a lot of ethical concerns. But basically, Topis is a giant smart system that controls the traffic and is managed at the highest level by humans. Anyway, after that we left to go get hotteok and bingsu. 

So hotteok is like a pancake and has a really good bread outside and honey and sesame seeds on the inside. I loved it!!! So much that I accidentally held up the group and got a second one. The bread was good the inside was sweet and it was warm to eat. Then we went and got bingsu which is ice flakes and ice cream. But I can’t eat that, so me and Sophie left to go to the Lego store. But they didn’t have the set I wanted! They ran out with was super sad. But we got press on reusable press-on nails instead. It wasn’t a Lego set but was nice. I was also running out of room in my bag, so I bought another backpack to be my carry on. After that I went to the basement of the hotel to go over my group’s presentation. 

We present by groups and there are four groups each group has a presentation about a smart systems and Korea, and then a video. I was in charge of the video, so I didn’t make any of the slides I was just told what to say. The first two groups to go took a really long time so by the time it got to us we were told to speed things up. Our presentation when very well overall. And then it was time for my video. It was a bunch of photos and videos of our trip plus a running gag of Felix’s phone being broken. After that we are done, and we all started to get ready to go to the cooking class.

I know a lot of people were looking forward to the cooking class, but it isn’t my strong suit. I still had a great time though. We make gimbap which is like Korean sushi. It doesn’t have fish in it, but it did have crab. We also made noodles and threw in a lot of veggies. Now I think me and Gabby under cooked the noodles, so I didn’t eat all of those, but I ate all the gimbap. That was good and I think we did a good job. We followed instructions well and didn’t leave a mess. 

After that a small group of us went back to go shopping. I got some last min gifts and then we spend the rest of the night in olive young. We stayed until they were ushing us our because they were closing. I am going to miss Korea. The olive young’s, the shopping, the tower, the new experiences, and the people. I loved the group I studied aboard with and made a ton of new friendships that I hope to carry on into the coming semesters. We still have one more day here so I’m not saying goodbye yet!