I’m currently sitting at my desk in my SNU (Seoul National University) dorm room! It’s super nice here; campus is beautiful and really big. There’s buses that run every few minutes that take you to the subway station or to a more populated/not-campus part of Seoul, so we can access the rest of the city pretty easily. The program I’m doing here is called Seoul National University International Summer Institute (ISI), and this year there’s over 500 students from all over the world. The program started just 7 years ago and the first year they did it they only offered 11 classes and I think only like 50 students participated. This year they’re offering 36 classes with faculty from universities around the world.
SNU campus is quite large.
My last day (Sunday) in Daegu was pretty uneventful. We left pretty early (11AM) because there’s supposedly a lot of traffic at the merging point of 2 major highways in Korea, so BK wanted to make sure we’d have enough time to take me to the co-op where I was staying for the night. BK told me to wake up at 8AM and that we’d leave his sister’s apartment by 9… but apparently he doesn’t really stick to these statements. He himself woke up at around 9:45 so we didn’t leave until 10:30. We ate breakfast and I took a selfie with So-Young before I left. BK’s sister kept telling So-Young that I was leaving and that I’m going back to America and she probably won’t see me for a long time…so she ran to the couch and hid under a blanket for 10 minutes. She was really cute and I’m glad we got to hang out! Bobby met her while he was in Korea 2 years ago but she didn’t remember him (sorry Bobs)
So-Young! So cute
English unni and So-Young ❤
We drove back to BK’s parents’s house to say goodbye. His mom gave me this gigantic bag of stuff to take home to my 할모니 and 할아버지 in Dallas and for my parents as well. She gave me these packages of various dehydrated things for my grandma; there’s a few packages of various types of dried fish as well as a block of dried and compressed pepper flakes that looks and has a similar mass to a large stone. I’m not sure how I’m going to manage to bring all of it back (especially because I’m gonna be going home from China, and someone told me it’s harder to bring foodstuffs from China to the US) so I might just mail it before I leave. At 11 BK and his wife drove me back to the co-op where all the other Penn-In-Seoul people have been staying for the internship period. I had to pay for my room but it was like $60 for a night and I got a nice big bed and a room to myself so I wasn’t gonna complain. Before I went back to the co-op, BK and HyunJi took me to lunch. We ate budae-jjigae (부대찌개), which is like spicy ramen with literally everything in it. Koreans started making it during the Korean War (I think) when Americans gave them cans of spam to eat since it doesn’t have to be refrigerated and probably lasts forever. They made ramen with spam and hot dogs and kimchi and ddeok (ricecakes) and bacon and so many other things. The kind we ate didn’t have bacon but instead had really thin pork belly (samgyeopsal 삼겹살). It sounds kind of gross but it was really tasty.
Budae jjigae aka army stew (budae means army). So delicious.
After I got back and deposited all of my stuff in my room, I went to HongDae with Mawunyo and Patty to eat an early dinner and then we went on a cruise on the Han River! The cruise was from 7:30 to 9:00 PM, so it got pretty chilly and windy by the end. We reached a bridge and there was a cool water/light show. I guess it happens every 30 minutes, so we were lucky to be there for it. It seemed like a waste of water/electricity but like it was pretty so it didn’t matter. heh.
예쁘다~
2013: The Summer of Selfies
the moon is orange here just fyi
Han river night cruise wooo
Kooooorrreeeeeaaaaa
After we docked, some of us decided to go out to a bar in HongDae. We stayed out pretty late, and some of them wanted to go to 노래방 (karaoke) afterwards, but I wasn’t really feeling well (plus I really don’t like singing) so I took a cab back to the co-op. I got back at like 2AM and bought a giant bottle of water and some kimbab at a store across from the co-op. I was staaaarving when I got back and I really wanted Korean food but I’m not confident enough in my Korean to order over the phone, plus I didn’t have the phone numbers of any nearby restaurants. I tried to order food online but a combination of factors (i.e. my lack of Korean-reading-abilities and my mental state at the time) really made the process difficult, so I gave up after an hour of scouring the internet for Korean delivery places in Seoul.
We left for SNU the next afternoon at 1:30PM. It took about an hour to drive to SNU’s campus, which is somewhere in the mountains really close to the center of Seoul. I thought I had escaped the mountains when I left Anseong but I guess my destiny was to live in the mountains for 9 weeks while I’m here. Luckily there’s approximately 817239582374 more things to do here than in Anseong so I won’t die of boredom. When we got here we checked in, got a free shirt and zip-up hoodie, and signed up for field trips. There’s a trip to GyeongJu (a really old and palace-y city near the coast) this weekend which I’ll be going to, and then there’s a trip to the broadcasting station SBS to watch a rehearsal of the music show Inkigayo (!!!!!!! so excited for this) and a tour of the station, and a Seoul city tour. I’m really excited for all the field trips because they’re things I would want to do but probably wouldn’t be able to do by myself or like with family. While here I also have to find time between studying and these trips to meet up with a lot of family on both my mom’s side and my dad’s side. I already met with most if not all of my dad’s relatives that I was supposed to meet so now I have to meet with Ruby’s relatives. I’ve met some of them before so I’m looking forward to seeing them again. I’ve literally never met some of my dad’s relatives but they were all kind of arguing over whose apartment/house I’d stay at while I was in Daegu so I think there was a little bit of tension while I visited. They were all really nice though, and I’m glad they took the time to see me!
On a different note, classes officially start tomorrow. I’m taking East Asia: Past and Present and US & Asia. I kind of wanted to take Korean Language but I’m taking it in the fall at Penn and I wouldn’t get credit for it here. I’m really excited though because I’ve never taken a class specifically about Asian history or Asian international affairs and it seems really interesting. All of the Penn kids are taking the East Asia class together so that should be interesting. Apparently each year the American students are super aggressive when participating in class discussion and all the other international kids are really quiet. Typical.
Everyone I’ve met who’s not from Penn has been really nice. We’ve befriended some girls from The Netherlands who live on our floor, so we’ve been hanging out with them these past few days. I’m looking forward to making a lot of international friends these next 5 weeks! wooooo
Anywho, that’s all for now. It’s been a while since I last posted… I’ll try to be better about posting more often.
안녕!
Seoul Adventures 