LIFE ON 'THE PENN': Sungshin Women's University Tour

I had the opportunity to be part of an escorted tour of Sungshin University that was arranged by a Korean officer's wife who works there. (At this point, Korean etiquette would dictate that I say wonderful impressive things about this couple and my connections to them, but I'm not Korean, so...) I went solo, my husband's exact words being "Why on earth would I want to tour a women's college?". To my surprise, since this was arranged primarily for American servicemembers and their spouses, most of my fellow tourists were Korean. Someone said this was due to the above parenthetical comment; I don't know, I just found it surprising.

We had a brief talk about the university founder, then over to the ROTC section. After that it was the small art museum that houses a 150 year old and very special map of Korea called daedong yeojido, or grand map of Korea. (They explained it to us, and while it was interesting, I won't go into details here.) Then we had to sit through a propaganda talk about the Korean education system, in which he even used a brief clip of President Obama speaking. I have many of my own thoughts on the Korean system, the American system, Korean v. American systems, and Obama, but this isn't the forum. Neither was that, so I kept my mouth clamped shut. Next, we were shuttled over to the second campus, called the eco-campus, composed of four buildings. I think it was 'eco' because it had several trees planted and they made use of natural light so as not to rely so much on electric lights. It was a very small and compact campus by any standard. We were served a delicious Korean lunch, and then had a tour of this campus. This included a small natural history museum consisting mostly of plants, and what they called costume museum, but was actually a hanbok museum. We also got to sample three different traditional teas and rice cakes and rice candy. These rice cakes were different from what I've had before, and were quite good. The tour concluded with performances of traditional Korean dance performed by students majoring in traditional dance.