The last week or so has been extremely busy but also very memorable. It began with cramming for the finals and trying to finish off a 3000 word take home exam.  Once all that was dealt with it was time of course for post exam celebrations!  The post exam celebrations led straight into goodbye and farewell festivities.  This culminated in staying up all night to see some friends off at the airport and coming home and preparing to move into new accommodation.  Most of the international students have gone back to their respective countries now that exams are over but I’m staying on one more month.  I decided to move out of the international dormitory and down a little bit closer to restaurants and transportation.

The weekend previous to final examinations was when I went to Jeju Island.  This was a great trip and one of the highlights of my time in Korea.  Jeju Island is a special autonomous island to the South of Korea.  It contains the Jeju Volcano and lava tubes both of which are World Heritage listed.  Myself and 4 other international students left Seoul on Thursday afternoon and arrived in Jeju after about an hour on the plane.  Our party consisted of a German named Florian, two French girls Audrery and Marine, a Korean girl Guiree and myself.  We hired a car from the airport and were off!  After checking in at a nice little hostel we went down to see the beach at night.  Over the weekend we did lots of sightseeing in the car or using hire bikes and we also spent lots of time at the beach.  We didn’t realise until we arrived that our visit coincided with an ASEAN summit being held on the island at the same time.  This meant that there was an extremely large amount of security and police on the island to ensure the smooth running of the summit and the protection of the foreign representatives.  While driving around the island we were stopped for a routine bomb check of the car and could barely drive 100m without seeing a police officer.  To access the best beach you have to cut through the Hyatt Hotel.  The first day we did this with no problem but on the second day the summit had begun and it was a little more trouble.  We had to go through a metal detection and then we were issued with little badges to access the beach.  It was all quite entertaining.  On the final day we went Scuba diving.  The brilliant thing was we didn’t have to go through and medical procedures or any extensive training.  The instructor showed us how the equipment worked when we arrived and then we jumped in his truck and were ferried off to an nearby smaller island.  From here we took turns going down with the instructor for a 15m dive.  It was great fun it was refreshing that we didn’t have to go through tedious or exuberant safety precautions which takes the fun out of a lot of these activities back home.