Hi! Finally I am getting this blog up and running! My name's Olivia and I'm a 20 year old (turning 21 tomorrow actually^^) student from America studying abroad in South Korea. This blog is to catalog all my awesome and exciting (and maybe sometimes even a little strange) adventures in Seoul! Of course there will be both good times and bad– times where I wish time would stop so I could stay here forever and times where I'll be hugging my stuffed giraffe wishing I were at home with my mommy and daddy–and I want to share it all with you! Please keep me company while I adapt to a new culture, language and lifestyle!
Most of you know already that I have about 2 years' Korean language experience. Korean is an extremely important thing to me and it's something I put many hours per day into studying. I want to try any and every new experience that I come across here, as a way to broaden my language experience and become a wiser person.
Okay, enough of that talk– let's get down to it!
My flight was last Friday at 12:50am from JFK in New York. The flight itself was a direct Korean Air Flight that lasted about 14 hours =.= The plane itself was not uncomfortable and the attendants were extremely helpful and communicated with me in Korean rather than insisting upon using English. The only uncomfortable thing was that I didn't have an aisle seat as was sat next to a much older woman who slept most of the flight. There were two people to my right, so as you can imagine getting up to go to the bathroom was pretty difficult. I felt extremely impolite climbing over a sleeping woman, even though I asked her permission, so it was about 4 hours before I had a chance to go to the bathroom. The woman was so nice to me, though, and asked me a lot of questions about my life and what I am interested in. The food on the plane was actually pretty tasty– I recommend choosing the Korean option. For dinner they gave bibimbap which is rice mixed with beef and vegetables and miyeokkuk which is seaweed soup. For breakfast they gave hinssaljuk (this is my own attempt at romanization and I'm trying to do it phonetically so please forgive me if it's super wrong) which is rice porridge.
I arrived at Incheon Airport Sunday at 5:50am Korean Time. The journey through immigration and customs was extremely smooth and I don't have any complaints about it. Once I got out of the terminal, I was starving and in desperate need of caffeine. I went to a Dunkin' Donuts and bought 2 donuts and a latte. The donuts were flaky and delicious and Pooh-bear themed.
This was right outside the terminal...there are things with k-pop idols EVERYWHERE but I ain't mad let's be real.
After that I took the 6002 airport limousine bus towards Cheongryangri and got off at Shinchon subway station. The bus only cost 10,000KRW (about 10 dollars) A cab will cost you maybe 40-50,000KRW and that's lowballing it because there are many taxi-drivers who will not hesitate to rip off unknowing foreigners. The bus took about 40 minutes. My first night in Seoul I stayed at a place called Ami Guesthouse in Shinchon. At first I had no idea where to go and was a little stressed out because I had really heavy suitcases. I stood around sighing for about 15 minutes only to look up and see the sign for the guesthouse RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. It was a third floor walk up and I was greeted by a kind woman who didn't speak much English (this stay was a real test for my Korean skills). The room was bright and clean. The bathroom was something I wasn't used to...it was a separate room outside on the porch and instead of having a separated shower, the shower head, toilet and sink were all in one space. I definitely recommend this house though. The owner is kind, attentive, and patient. She made me breakfast the next day as well!
I was a little nervous to go out and find dinner so I went around and walked the area a bit and got a hazelnut latte from a chain café called TOMNTOM. It was tasty but sort of expensive.
I gave up on trying to find a restaurant and went to a convenience store and bought some chips, soft boiled eggs and melon milk!! The man working at the store started telling me all about his honeymoon in Hawaii and how much he loved it. He was so excited to tell me about it and it was really cute.
There's a lot of flavoured milks in Korea–strawberry, banana (personal fave), melon, sweet potato...the melon kind was super sweet but I love the shape the bottles come in!
Anyway the next morning after eating breakfast I had to move into the dorm. I wasn't really sure where to go, so I ended up walking all the way through campus with my two huge suitcases up a bunch of hills and through crowds of Korean college graduates and their families. I found it eventually and found a place to buy a prepaid SIM card for my phone. If you have Verizon and have an android form, it is already unlocked and ready for global use, so all you have to do is find a Korean telephone company like Olleh or SK Telecom and they can get one for you. The thing is that they have to do all sorts of official stuff and it took my maybe 3 days to get mine. I met a girl and boy from California and tagged along with them for lunch. We went for a walk outside the campus and got dinner near Hyundai Department store. We were really craving street food but it was really cold outside, so we found a place where we could sit down. We ate tteokbokki (pronounced duck-bohk-ee), sundae (pronounced soon-day), odeng, kimbap, and for some reason they gave us carbonara pasta as well. Tteokbokki is one of my all-time favorite foods. They are chewy boiled rice cakes in spicy-sweet red pepper paste, often served with fish cakes, hard-boiled eggs, and vegetables. Sundae are intestines stuffed with noodles (this was actually my favourite out of this plate!) Kimball is made up of things like rice, vegetables, sometimes fish, chicken, or spam, mayonnaise, and kimchi rolled up in seaweed. Odeng are fish cakes, which are the things on sticks in the picture below.^^
After that we were craving dessert and went to a dessert chain called Seolbing. Seolbing sells a kind of dessert called pat bingsu, which is Korean shaved ice. It comes in all kinds of different flavors but we order the classic one..sadly I forgot the name. It had a sort of almond-y taste and came with a sweet syrup to pour over the top.
In the subway station there was also a Kakao Talk Pop-up store. Kakao is a free chatting and calling app a lot of people in Korea use. They have these really cute emoticons:
I think you've been hit with enough information so far. My next blog entry is going to be about Orientation, shopping in Ehwa, and going to Hongdae with my friend JuHyun. I hope you all keep reading!
