MUNY 2015

If any of you are "living for" this blog as the youth are saying, I apologize. If you have no idea what this means, allow me to explain, because this phrase is basically in reference to really liking something. I am fully aware that most slang in today's world makes little to no sense.
Moving on from that foray into popular culture, I had a pretty awesome weekend. I got to be a standing adviser for the first Model United Nations conference put on by Seoul YMCA. In all honesty, I have been helping with it since the middle of the planning for the project, and I am honestly really grateful that I was allowed to help see it to its culmination. I loved sitting in the English room of the conference (There were two Korean rooms) and helping with input as to who should be recognized for things like "Best Delegate" (Israel) and "Honorable Mention" (Sr: Russian Federation, Jr: Finland). The whole thing felt a lot like being back with all my friends from speech and debate. I loved listening to them, surprised by how good most of them were with English speaking and writing skills. I walked out of the whole conference feeling really inspired to look more into the political things that are going on in the world, and to think about the ways that I can try to fix things, even if I can only work on a small scale.
I have to say that the only part of the experience that was not fun for me was a situation that was in blatant disregard of the rules. I can only assume that the people who agreed to staff the conference did not pay any attention to the rules that they were supposed to follow. Basically, one of the guys from my office got drunk the first night of the conference and then called his wife and had two of the women who were also from my office to help him lie to his wife, telling her that he was not drunk. The whole thing made me really uncomfortable because I have little to no experience with dealing with drunk people and I really felt uncomfortable with the fact that it was obvious he was lying to his significant other... This also led to a whole other can of worm, this idea that the older generations in Korea still sort of place women as second place citizens- (I will not get into this now, especially because people around my age and younger are obviously not following along with this cultural ideal).
One of the other fun parts of the experience were the superlatives. The chairs of ECOSOC (The branch of Model UN that I was sitting in) were funny and engaging, honestly reminding me that people around my age all over the world can be amazing human beings-- and they were brave enough to sing a karaoke duet of "Love is and Open Door" from Disney's Frozen for us. My faith in humanity was restored, and hearing a bunch of the delegates sing (Including the Secretary General, and I caught that performance on video, so that will be on my FB page soon). The delegate voted best speaker was New Zealand, and she was asked to give an impromptu speech about the delegate of Germany who was her partner in the runner- up position for cutest couple. Honestly, her speech was kind of amazingly inspiring, even though she was not in an actual couple with the delegate of Germany; the couple that won were the only actual couple in the room.
Basically, this past weekend was the perfect thing to take my mind off the fact that something is going on that is decidedly unsavory with my Korean phone. I'm not sure if any of you remember the whole fiasco with my number apparently being the property of the US military, but I'm pretty sure that this whole thing is involved with the reason that my phone number was cancelled, and nobody was able to help me fix the problem. I have really high hopes that this whole thing can be sorted out by Wednesday of this week, and I will keep you all posted.
Love ,
Elena
PS: Do I want to go into International Relations or Global Logistics and Supply Chain Management? ARRRGGHHH!