Day 6: Seoul Tour Round 2!

Today was... well, quite frankly, crazy! Our study abroad group met at 9 am for Round 2 of our Seoul Tour. I'm not sure I can even remember all the things we did today! But it started with a trip to a traditional Korean housing area. It was really cool to see what that looked like, but kinda awkward since it wasn't just a tourist attraction, there were actual people living in the homes. Some of the details were amazing, though. The doors were particularly fascinating, each one being a display of detailed craftsmanship with their decorations.

Just a short walk from the traditional housing was the Blue House! That's pretty much the Korean equivilant of the White House. They had security guards who were checking bags for weapons blocks before the house was even in sight! The security was really impressive. And a lot of people in my group were excited to see it because they had seen it in so many k-drama's.

Our next stop was right across the street! At Gyeongbokgung Palace. It was comprised of a beautiful pond, traditional architecture, statues, and even a museum! We only had half an hour to peruse the museum, but it was fascinating. They had lots of Korean art! That was my favorite part: looking through all the paintings, pottery, and clothing. Although we spent lots of time at Gyeongbokgung Palace, it's hard to actually describe what we did. A lot of it was just enjoying the sights. Hence, pictures will sum it up better. Hopefully I'll be posting some on facebook soon!

After that, we walked through a very interesting section of Seoul. In the middle of the modern, downtown city, a beautiful little man-made, stream-type thing ran down a trench of sorts. Again, this is a really difficult thing to describe! But it was crazy. One minute you'd be walking on the street, but then you'd go down some stairs and almost feel like you were on a nature trail. There was foliage, birds, and even fish!

Finally, we took a lunch break. YES, that all happened BEFORE lunch!

Once we finished eating, it was off to the "Hanbok Experience!" Hanbok is the traditional dress of Korea. So we went to a store where we rented Hanbok to take pictures in! It was so fun. Everyone looked so cute in their Hanbok outfits~! I'll post pictures of this too.

Last Stop! A Buddhist temple. There's really not much to say about this, other than it looked cool too. There were some big, gold Buddha's in the temple and some cool paper fish hanging all over the palce. That was cool.

After that, our tour guide showed us how to get back to the subway to get back to the university! But me, Chris, Kate, and Jenna decided to keep looking around and have some fun. So we headed to the nearest Cold Stone Creamery (Yep, they have those even in Korea!), where we met up with one of Kate's friends from High School. We were going to go see Guardians of the Galaxy too, but then it wasn't at the theater we went to. Boohoo! Instead, we just looked around in some shops nearby. We walked around for a long time! We ended up going to Lotte, which is pretty much the Korean equivalent of Nordstroms. But better. Unfortunately, equally as expensive. So it was more of a 'looking around' trip than a 'buying' trip. There were also some fun street performers! There were two stages where dance groups were performing and lip-syncing to popular k-pop songs. We grabbed dinner while we were out, too. And during dinner we all totally crashed! By the time we left, though, we had literally been walking around Seoul for almost 12 straight hours, so it made sense for us to be exhausted.

And thus concludes our week of orientations and tours! Tomorrow is just a free day to rest up before classes begin. Part of me is sad that we don't have more tours and have to start classes. But the other part of me is so ready to be done! It's been an insanely busy week and I'm excited for it to calm down a bit.

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Days 4 & 5: Funeral & Subway Challenge

The past two days have been really great! Yesterday I met my Mission Mentor for the first time! A Mission Mentor is someone who volunteers with the Christian study abroad program I am a part of. We (me, the Mission Mentor, and the other girl who is part of the Christian program named Kate) are going to meet once a week to have a Bible study and just talk about life. Bora is also going to help Kate and I get involved in a church here in Korea where we can hopefully help out in the Youth as well as helping us get connected with service projects. It's a really neat opportunity to have someone like Bora to help us out! Bora is also very nice, kind, and beautiful. She's not that much older than us (her late 20's I think) so she is really easy to connect with. I'm excited to get to know her better!

After meeting with Bora, I had a really unique opportunity to go to a Korean funeral. Heather, one of my best friends from High School (she actually lived with me and my family during our senior year of high school) is Korean but goes to college in the US. Her grandfather unfortunately passed away and she was in Korea for a few days for the funeral. Since I was here too, she invited me and our other friend from high school, Hanna, to come. Hanna and I were kinda nervous to go, but we decided to go to see Heather. And Korean funerals are a lot different than American funerals, although you are still supposed to wear black. They're three days long, and one of the days is open to family and friends to come pay their respects and chat with the family. That's when Hanna and I went. Heather met us outside the funeral place and explained to us what we were supposed to do. When we entered the room, we needed to take off our shoes and approach the shrine of sorts set up for her grandpa. We took a flower from the pot on the floor and placed it above the picture of her grandpa.  Then we said a prayer for him before exiting to the next room. That room had tables and waiters would bring food and it was just a place to hang out and talk. She Heather, Hanna, and I spent the next four hours just catching up on what was new since high school! It was so fun getting to be with them both again.

After that, Hanna and I rode the subway back to my University and she helped me buy some food and return a wireless router I had bought and decided I didn't need. Then I went to sleep.

Today started off on the right foot with a skype call with my man! It's been really hard being apart from him and my family and friends. But this is a wonderful adventure! And luckily I've been able to skype Chris and my parents a few times already. I love you all and miss you!

After my skype call, my study abroad group went for the "subway challenge!" Basically, our study abroad leader emailed us a list of places we had to find and take pictures at, all of which required using the subway. If we found them all, the reward was free tickets to a baseball game! It was a lot of fun and we got some really cute pictures! We went to Seoul City Hall, Deoksugung Palace, Sungnyemun Gate, Namdaemun Market, and the Seoul Train Station. I know I just met the people in my group a few days ago, but we have all bonded really well! We all feel very comfortable around each other and they're all a ton of fun!

Once we got back, some boring things happened that I won't talk too much about. I took a nap. I went to an orientation. Blah blah blah. But after orientation Kate, Chris, and I went to find out where all our classes are for next week. Campus is so big! I know I'm going to get lost. But we managed to find all our classes somehow so that's good. And as a reward for finding our classes, our study abroad program gave us movie tickets! woohoo!

My whole group met up again after that to go out to dinner. We walked around Seoul for a while, just looking for somewhere to eat. The problem isn't that there's a lack of food places, the problem is that there's too many food places! It's hard to pick just one. But finally we found this really cheap, really good restaurant! I got an entire dinner meal for 3,000 won, which is about $3 in American money. And the good thing about going out in a group is that everyone can get a different dish and we all just share and try each other's! It's a ton of fun. We also went out for dessert, which was this really good shaved ice dessert. It's basically just plain shaved ice with a little milk mixed in and topped with things. We got two to all share. One was topped with peanut butter and like graham cracker crumble. The other was topped with fruit! They were both so good.

Now the last thing on my agenda is just looking out my window. I can see all the city lights of Seoul every single night since I'm on the 5th floor overlooking the city! And tonight is extra special because there's a lightening storm right now! I am so incredibly blessed to be in this beautiful city.

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Day 3: Seoul Tour

Yet another wonderful day in South Korea! The day started out with some boring orientation stuff, of which I will spare you the details. Things started getting interesting when we got our schedules and took a city tour of Seoul!

Our schedules are rather confusing. Printed off, they're nearly impossible to read! The only thing you can really tell is when they are and the class number. So I had to look up online what classes each of them actually were and what building they are in. But the building names are still in Korean, so that will be interesting. And right now I'm kinda confused about my schedule, but I'll talk to the study abroad office about it tomorrow! The good news is that I seem to have gotten into all the classes I really really wanted to take: History of Western Architecture, International Fashion Marketing, and Consumer Research Methodology. Now I just have to hope that the professors decide to actually teach the courses in English! The study abroad leader said that sometimes if there's only one English-only student in the class, the teachers will decide it isn't worth teaching the class in English and they'll just teach in Korean instead. That would be such a bummer! But I know of one other person signed up for my Architecture class, so hopefully that'll work out.

Now for the more exciting part of our day... The Seoul tour! However, the name of the event was rather misleading. Seoul is much, MUCH too big. Just to put it in perspective, Seoul is home to almost 10 million people crammed into 230 square miles. If you thought New York was busy, think again! Seoul houses almost 2 million more people than New York in HALF the square mileage of New York. There is so much to look at! But we went to two specific places today. First of all, Seoul Tower! Set atop a hill, Seoul Tower is 777 feet high and provides an absolutely breathtaking panoramic view of the entire city of Seoul! I'll post pictures on facebook, because words cannot do it justice. In addition to it's views, the tower has a pavilion with shops, food, and a martial arts demonstration! That was insanely cool to see. After years of reading manga and seeing anime, it was so awesome to see it happen in real life! Haha. They used traditional weaponry and demonstrated all sorts of moves. It included the death of many sticks of bamboo by swords. After the tower, we went to Myeong-dong, a popular shopping destination! There were lots of food stands, stalls peddling jewelry, large department stores, and everything in between!

After our long day, we returned to campus, got food, and called it a day, much to my relief. I'm not sure my feet have ever hurt more in my life! Sleep will feel good tonight for sure!

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Day 1 & 2

Well, I have officially completed two days of my study abroad! And they've definitely been eventful. Very eventful indeed.

First, it began with almost 24 hours of travel time between leaving my hotel in Portland and arriving at my dorm in Seoul, South Korea. I was supposed to fly over with my friend Hanna, but there was a mixup and we weren't on the same flight, which provided some interesting experiences with trying to get through immigration and customs! But it all worked out. Once I arrived, one of the leaders of ISA (International Students Abroad) met me at the airport and quickly ushered me into a cab to make the journey to the dorms, where I was met by another ISA leader who, just as quickly, handed me some general dorm information, my card for dorm entry, and left me at the door to my dorm building. After getting yelled at in Korean by the dorm security guard (WHY that happened still remains a mystery to me), failing at using the elevator (apparently certain elevators can only go to certain floors), and arriving at my room (the door locks are super high tech. I think just to mess with us.) I finally got to unpack. At that point though, honestly, I had never felt so alone in my life. Nobody had spoken more than 10 sentences of English to me since I got off the plane and my dorm hall seemed completely deserted other than me. People who say everyone speaks English in Korea are definitely lying! Lying down to sleep with just my sheets, a thin blanket I confiscated from my international flight, and a sweatshirt for a pillow, I was almost certain coming to Korea was the biggest mistake I'd ever made.

Day Two, luckily, was a major turnaround. It started with a skype call to my family (which was much needed!) and the ISA orientation. I met most of the other ISA American students outside the dorm and we all walked over to the meeting together. It was so relieving hearing English again! And everyone in my group is really chill. At the meeting, they gave us some more details about contacting them and our itinerary, which was very much appreciated! Up to that point, I had absolutely no idea what to expect in the future. After the meeting, a group of us students went to the store to pick up essential items like pillows, hangers, toiletries, etc. We grabbed some quick lunch and then headed to another ISA meeting. This one was a campus tour (although I probably won't remember where anything is! Campus is really big!), followed by a trip to the Konkuk University Hospital (good to know) and subway station (which is under the hospital!). We also purchased subway cards while we were there. The tour was over at 3pm, leaving plenty of day left to explore! I joined up with my new friends Kate and Chris (pretty much the coolest people ever) for some fun little escapades! We got bubble tea, made the trek to Gangam (Yep, I totally had Gangam Style!!), and visited a Cat Cafe!! Not gonna lie, the Cat Cafe was super awesome. (: For about $8 you get a cup of coffee and entrance into a little cafe where cats run rampant! It was so cute. And really fun getting to pet all the cats. (: Turns out all three of us (me, Kate, and Chris) are really big cat fans. It was fun! We were then going to meet up with the rest of our ISA group for dinner, but we were about to get back on the subway when Chris realized he forgot his backpack in the Cat Cafe! Ooops. So we had to go back for that and missed our group leaving for dinner. So Chris and Kate and I went to a little street restaurant and had skewers and shrimp! It was really cool because they brought the skewers and then we cooked them ourselves over some hot coals they put in the middle of the table. The food is surprisingly good! A little spicy at times, but I haven't been starving to death.

Although my trip started out awful, I think I'm going to love it a lot. Today was vastly more wonderful than yesterday! Maybe I can survive this city after all. I'm really excited to see what other adventures lie ahead! And I'll try to get some pictures up on facebook. (: Thanks for listening to me drone on and on!

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This is a Test

Well, I created a new blog to chronicle my adventures in Seoul! I'm still working on getting it set up though, so this is just a test post to see how things look.

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