Tennis and dorm payments

Sadly, I won't be able to stay with tea club...

Part of the clubs here is this requirement that you need to attend Membership Training (MT). One of the international students described it as "everyone just drinks a lot." I asked someone at tennis club, when she was telling me about MT, and I said that was my understanding. She said "Oh, no no no no...wait, yeah, everyone is usually drunk." What I've learned so far is that I don't really know what MT is other than there is alcohol present there.

I think most clubs have MT on the same day -- March 29th - 30th. With tea club, I could only go once a week and I would be unable to join them at MT because tennis club has the same weekend. I am depressed that I can't do both, but tennis club is more important to me than tea at this point.

Wednesday night was my second night of tennis. I had mentioned tennis to a couple other international students and they expressed interest in joining me, but they had no rackets. Therefore, only one person came with me to Smash (I think the name is cool --tennis club just sounds boring compared to SMASH! [emotion added by me]) and borrowed a racket. It was a good night.

Quick observations about Korean tennis (although this may only be the Ewha tennis club and not all tennis):

1) There is a lot of bowing. When we greeted each other at the net, we bowed. When someone was about to start serving, they bowed. When there was a good shot, there was bowing.
2) Make game/make deuce. When the next serve was for a game, whoever had the advantage would yell to everyone on the court "make game!" The other team, would of course, say "make deuce!" It was actually pretty fun to be serving for the game and yell to my partner "make game!"
3) "Fightin." When the match was about to start (I played doubles), my partner and my opponent both yelled "Fightin" (fighting, but take out the ng ending and shorten the i...it sounds like fight-teen). As I was leaving, I saw like three other women do the same thing. I was told it was like "let's fight and win," but it was only one word.
4) Korean tennis players, like Americans, also don't like getting hit with the ball. I framed a ball and accidentally hit one of the feeders (it wasn't hard), and she didn't seem to like it.

On to payments. To live in the dorms, it costs around $900 for March through mid-June. It isn't too bad, except that if one doesn't have a Korean bank account, that person has to pay with cash. Since I didn't have a bank account, I had to pay that fee with cash. My bank back home, Key Bank, limited me to $300 over a 24 hour period, excluding holidays and weekends. Those days off were at local time back home, making me wait until Tuesday (in Korea) before I could withdraw my $290.

To make this funny, the largest Korean bill in circulation is the 10,000 Won ($10). Meaning that when I went to pay the housing cost, I had 92 bills in my pocket. It was also the most money I can ever remember holding since I became accustomed to paying with checks/credit cards.