I just finished my Korean finals today! And I think they went pretty well!

The last class is Thursday, and I’m excited to finally be able to sleep in, Skype with people in the US more often, focus on piano, and just chill a little more than I’ve been able to these past 10 weeks. But as the end draws near, I’m also realizing there are a lot of things I’m going to miss.

For instance, when you’re studying Korean on your own, you don’t get to laugh at all the stupid mistakes your classmates make (like the time a fellow student said he wanted to marry a “fat” girl instead of a “smart” one) or at all the stupid questions you publicly ask (like the time I asked my teacher to explain a word in our day’s reading and she said it was one of the character’s names).

No, but seriously, I’m afraid the amount of laughter in my life is going to dramatically decrease once class is over and the bulk of my time is spent by myself in front of a piano. I love playing piano, but I wish it weren’t such a solitary thing sometimes.

I love the spontaneous social interaction that happens in a school setting. During break, I can chill on the couch in the hallway and chat with guys from Colombia in broken Spanish interspersed with Korean and English. I can randomly decide to eat curry with classmates at 10:30am at the cafeteria in the basement. I get to trade shopping tips with the girls who sit next to me, laugh at my classmates’ imitations of my teachers’ quirks, and bump into acquaintances on the stairs and have awkward (or nice) interactions.

Oh, how I will miss these little moments.

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