QATAR VS. SOUTH KOREA

Tuesdays are usually boring school nights filled with homework, but this Tuesday was different from the usual routine.  Luck was on our side because we had the opportunity to attend a 2014 FIFA World Cup Qualifying match between South Korea and Qatar. This same night we were supposed to meet our mentors for dinner, but instead we changed our plans of having dinner to attending the soccer match. It was an amazing experience. South Korea won the match scoring 2 goals during the second half of the game! 

Our mentors chose the Red Devil's Area in which Korea's biggest fans gather and cheer the loudest for the team. It was definitely the most fun we have had in a long time. Drums and horns in every direction and we kept on singing and screaming 대한민국!! Which translates to the Republic of Korea!

Weekend Outing

This weekend we explored the streets of Hongdae and Gangnam. We spent our Friday exploring Hongdae with our friend Lucy who introduced us to her favorite restaurants, cafes, and stores and many other things. This time we visited Hongdae at night and boy does Hongdae come alive at night. Night time is definitely the best time to visit Hongdae, especially during the spring and summer ! It was so much fun we spent the whole day together and ended our outing at of course you guessed it, Karaoke a.k.a. noraebang!

Our friend Lucy took us to this restaurant so we could try Tteokboki and she also informed us that the restaurant's name is  Hongdae Gangsters!   

                         

This is the Tteokbokki from the Hongdae Gangsters and while it was spicy it was delicious. We also had pig stomach and pig intestines that are on the right. She was worried we wouldn't like it, but we informed her we ate this back home too. We also tried other dishes and overall the meal was delicious and we definitely plan to go back. 

Shopping in Hongdae is a dream. There are so many shops and most items are really cheap ! We stopped by Stylenanda a very popular online store. This one in Hongdae is there main one and we even had the opportunity to see the models!   The store has three floors, but there is not a lot of variety and everything that is sold here is one size and they only have certain items. The plus side is that the clothes is cheaper here than online especially for international buyers. The store was definitely an experience and we left with jackets we wear almost everyday. 

Our favorite part of the trip was the Hello Kitty Cafe ! Everything is pink and the whole place just looks amazing . While we loved what we saw the reason why we loved it the most can be explained by the picture below. THEY HAVE DR. PEPPER!! Dr. Pepper is rare in Korea! Lucy told us that this is because it is not very popular or well known in Korea. The only soft drinks you'll find are Coke, Sprite, and Mt. Dew. Some convenience stores carry Dr. Pepper, but only very fewand the other option is to travel a long distance to Costco. We were so happy to find it here. Also the dessert was delicious especially the frosting! 

Finally we ended up at a photo sticker shop! You'll find many of these throughout Korea, but they can be sort of expensive. A set of pictures will cost you around 6,000 to 8,000 won depending on the machine you choose.  

South Korean Vending Machines

Sometimes our days are so busy that we have absolutely no time to sit down and have a meal. On these days we try to make the best of it and luckily for us there are vending machines located all over campus! Classes in Korea are usually 3 hours long and we are given a ten minute, sometimes 15 minute break in which we take the opportunity to run to the vending machines and buy some snacks and drinks. These vending machines definitely become a student's best friend because it helps us get through the remainder of the class!

The vending machine on the right carries anything from Coke to juice, coffee in all different flavors. We have yet to try most of these since we've only bought coke. 

The Coffee Vending Machine is our best friend on the days we have Korean class since it's from 6 to 9pm. It's has coffee with sugar, coffee no sugar, hot chocolate and many other combinations of coffee and best of all it's only 300 won!  

These are also amazing they carry snacks and drinks ! Mostly it's water and teas but what we love is that they carry our favorite snacks like choco heim and potato chips in bigger sizes than you would find in U.S. vending machines! 

Care Package from Home

Korea has been wonderful and Korean food is delicious, but sometimes it's hard not to miss homemade food or even our favorite snacks that are either rare or in our case simply not sold in Korea at all. Even though we have been in Seoul for almost a month  our stomachs have not completely gotten used to Korean food and so we have been terribly longing for Mexican food. Because of this our worried parents decided to send us a care package filled with all our favorite American and Mexican snacks and candies, along with some very thoughtfully written letters from each of our family members. To our surprise the box was so big we had to have help carrying it back to our dorm. Well I mentioned in a previous post that we had been homesick for a while this package really helped! Little things from home and especially the letters have helped us cope with the homesickness. For any student studying abroad. we believe little things like care packages filled with movies, snacks or anything from back home can really help make your stay in a foreign country better.

Mexican Food in Korea

It's been three weeks and we've been craving Mexican food since we arrived. It's hard not to miss homemade food, but luckily today our friend Sangjun took us to EWAK a restaurant that specializes in Mexican cuisine and best of all it's not only located near Konkuk University, the food is also made by a Korean chef who looks to be the one who runs the place by himself although the place is quite small. The moment we entered the smell took us by surprise because it instantly reminded us of home. We could smell cilantro, chile, the meat being sautéed with seasonings from home. The menu consisted of different kinds of Quesadillas, as well as Chile con Carne, Fajitas, and rollies which I did not recognize but the taste was familiar. They also carried different kinds of beers such as Corona and such. We ended up ordering cheese quesadillas and a rolly. Needless to say it was delicious, and it definitely tasted like the food back home although not completely, but we left happy!

Starbucks in S. Korea

Back home our favorite coffee place has always been Starbucks so it has been quite interesting comparing the differences and similarities between a Starbucks in Korea and a Starbucks back in the U.S. The differences between each country are many, but they also share some similarities. We'd like to focus on the differences though because they are definitely something to talk about. What really caught our eye when we first entered Starbucks in Seoul was the size of the place. We've visited a few locations around Seoul and compared to the Starbucks in our city, the locations here are more spacious and often are two floors. It might be because Seoul is a large city, but I don't recall seeing locations as big as the ones in Korea even in New York City. One thing that really stands out is the size of the drinks. A venti in Korea is not a venti from back home; to us it seems that a venti in Korea is more like  equal in size to a grande in the U.S. Another thing that we have come to appreciate about the Starbucks here is that they serve your orders in trays! It's so convenient especially when you order pastries or multiple drinks and they don't ask for names at least they haven't at the locations we have been to instead they yell out the drinks in order, something that does not always happen in Starbucks back home so this means no taking someone else's drink or mix ups ! They also provide you with hand wipes to sanitize your hands before eating which is awesome. The last thing we really like and is extremely convenient, but at the same time is something that takes time to get used to is the recycling. This just doesn't happen in Starbucks it is everywhere! Any sort of restaurant, coffee place, fastfood joint has these recycling areas, and we love it ! The U.S. could learn a little something about Korea's recycling system. Although we have been going regularly to Starbucks we will soon start exploring local coffee shops to get the full experience, the only problem is that there are so many to choose from!

Starbucks is like our sanctuary away from home. 

Convenient and environmentally friendly.  

The view from the top floor. 

Take a Little Time

This is one of the noraebang we have been going to in 건대.

 

The first two weeks of being in Seoul were thrilling, breathtaking, and very much enjoyable. It was a mix of wonderful feelings and now we are half way into the third week and these feelings have subsided. Somedays if not everyday we feel frustrated, homesick, depressed and long for home. We miss our family, we miss the familiarity and ease of being back home. These feelings arise from the various frustrations we have been experiencing since the first day; the difference is that these have gotten more difficult such as communicating, overwhelming changes, the stress of classes, and daily small challenges that would not be a challenge back home. Communicating with others I believe has to be the most frustrating issue for us. While there are many tourists in Seoul and there is a great amount of English around most of the time you will have to communicate with people using hand gestures and so on. Communicating with professors and other classmates has also been frustrating. Finding the packets and books we need for class has become an issue because most of the time the people who sell them do not understand a word of English and this leads to considerable frustration as well as having no idea where some of the places where they sell our books are located. Our professors while they speak English have difficulty at times expressing themselves and we are often lost during class trying to figure out what is going on. Sometimes buying things or trying to get things becomes difficult, but it isn't all too bad because people are always willing to help! For instance one time a lady used her phone to translate what she was trying to ask us and other times we'll say it in Korean and they will try to say it in English and somehow we always (well most of the time) we manage to get somewhere maybe not always where we wanted to get to, but we get somewhere and learn what not to do next time.

Everyday is a new learning experience. The food has also not sat well with us and often we have trouble finding something to eat that won't make us feel sick, but we try everyday. While we have only been here for three weeks we have already learned so much and learned to appreciate the little things from back home. Everyday is going to be a challenge, but the real challenge is how we handle it and learn to cope and adapt to the situations we find ourselves in. We know it's going to get better as soon as we get the jist of things, but for now we have relied on karaoke known as 'noraebang' in Korean as a way to release the stress we feel. I think we have relied on it too much because we've been there already more than 4 times since we arrived.

                                           Got a perfect score on one of the songs we sang !

The first week of school

The first week of school is over and all we can say is that it did not go as smoothly as we wanted the week to go, but isn't that the best part of living in a foreign country where you don't speak the language? Making mistakes is probably something we will keep doing especially since our skills in Korean are not great, but learning from them is the important part. We started school on Monday and my sister and I along with two other girls missed our first class ! We found ourselves waiting in the wrong classroom for about 45 minutes until we called our program manager who informed us we had missed the class. Long story short our program manager Jaehoon told us we had gone to the wrong part of the building because apparently there is a new building and old and took us to the right building. Our class was located in the old building while we accidentally ended up in the new building, but the rest of the week went well! We did not miss any more classes and our classes were actually great. Our major here is Political Science because they do not have our major from back home which happens to be Chicano Studies or (Mexican American studies). Many people asked us why we chose South Korea since our major had nothing to do with Korea, but to our surprise the classes we are taking definitely correlate with our major well! I will have to elaborate on another post, but for now we also happened to go to the cafeteria for dinner a couple times. The food isn't bad, it's okay, but I think it's gonna take a while for our stomachs to get accustomed to the change.We haven't had the chance to try breakfast, but we will soon. Here are a few of the meals we've had so far.

Every Friday the school cafeteria brings out the Western Food option. This Friday morning the Western breakfast  featured included 2 slices of white bread, french fries, cereal and a small side salad. That's a pretty creative breakfast! Though it was tempting we ended up going with the Korean breakfast which was some kind of vegetable soup, steamed rice, kimchi and some other side dishes. 

Gyeongbok Palace

The last few posts have focused on certain aspects of living as a foreigner in Korea, but I want to focus this post on the different areas I have had the opportunity to visit in the past 10 days that I have been here. I honestly don't think I would have been to these many places if it hadn't been for my program. My sister Kai and I did however visit Hongdae on our own thanks to the help of our friend S who happens to be Korean !

Gyeongbok Palace

Gyeongbok Palace was such a beautiful place and it was huge! This is where I learned about 'ondol' or the floor heating system. The guards at the entrance were so serious and many people took pictures with them. They barely even blinked it was seriously an amazing place to visit. We also learned that the Gyeongbok Palace is  the largest and main palace out of the five palaces built by the Joseon Dynasty. It's one thing to learn about this through books, but to see it is something else. 

Buying a Cellphone in Korea

We did countless research about cellphones before going to Korea and all we found was that it was almost impossible to get a cellphone on your own and to an extent this is true, but what we did not know and what other blogs failed to inform us about were sim cards! Before we bought a cell phone we came with the idea that our phone would not work at all because it's a GSM phone and Korea's phones run on CDMA. Now that we're here we learned that this is not completely true. Everywhere we walked we saw signs that said GSM PHONE and for us this was great except for a minor detail; we did not unlock our phones before coming since the misleading information we found suggested our phones would be useless and so we were forced to buy a phone. When it came to buying a phone we actually had helped from our program manager Jaehoon who did all the talking for us and thankfully got a good deal on phones! What we did was go around different phone shops to find the cheapest one. We bought   used phones because we'll only be here for four months and we were able to find cheap smart phones too! We thought we were going to have to settle for a flip phone, but we really wanted smart phones for the apps that will definitely come in handy such as subway apps and so on. Beware it is important to have someone who speaks Korean with you because most likely people will not speak fluent english and that can be a difficult if not impossible process and sometimes they will try to rip you off. Of course this does not apply to everybody, but we did have some people trying to overcharge us for the phones which we ended up finding cheaper at another place.

Our phones are not CDMA, we bought GSM Korean phones and also bought a prepaid sim card; something we had no idea was available. Other people in the program who had unlocked phones were able to simply buy prepaid sim cards for their phones which was great, but I must add that not everyone was able to use their phone even though they were unlocked. People who had iphones had to get new phones. The sim card was about $20 and as of right now I am not exactly sure how it completely works, but from what I've learned it's best to use wifi and save the phone calls and texts for emergencies as well as making sure that you have nothing running on your phone (apps) so that you don't get overcharged. If you don't mind spending or recharging your card often then it's fine, but this is where apps such as Skype, Line, Whatsapp and Kakao Talk come in. They allow you to make free calls and send messages using wifi which save you a lot of money. Also wifi will only work if you have a Korean phone or sim card because in order to connect to the wifi you must have your passport number, full name and email.  If you're planning to stay in Korea for a few months then buying a used phoneand a sim card is definitely your best option and cheaper than signing a contract or renting a phone. It is also best to pay with cash because Jaehoon informed us that using a debit card/ credit card would add 10% tax.

This is what you will need when getting a phone in Korea:

Passport or copy of your passport
 Cash

That's pretty much it at least when it comes to buying a used phone and getting a sim card. The great thing about our study abroad program is that Jaehoon was nice enough to do all the paper work for us.

*UPDATE: 
When I first wrote this article iphones were pretty much new in Korea, but as long as it's unlocked, the sim card will also work on it. Also for some reason iphones and other apple products seem to get better service too especially in places like the subway and so on.

E-MART

     Since we arrived we have probably gone to E-mart about 10 times, maybe more. Somehow we always need something else. It's a good thing E-mart and other shops are of walking distance from the dorms. On the first day our program managers took us to E-mart and gave us half an hour to buy anything we needed such as bedding, shampoo and all the things we did not bring with us. We were told E-mart was the Walmart of Korea and it definitely seems that way. At first it was overwhelming and half an hour was not enough time to buy everything we needed. This is because we did not know where anything was and we had a hard time finding things. Now we navigate the store with such ease, but that first day was a blur. It was definitely a good idea for us to buy our own bedding at home because it's so expensive here! The only things we did buy concerning our beds were blankets and pillows which were relatively cheap. One thing I noticed is that there are different sales people located in the different sections of E-mart, something I hadn't seen before. The shampoo section, lotion, kitchen cleaning supplies, you name it, each all have their own sales person who try to get you to buy certain items on sale or are just simply there to help. This one lady even opened different shampoo bottles for us so we could smell them! After finding some of the things we need it we headed for the cashiers and though we didn't know what to expect that first day at E-mart we definitely learned a lot. After paying we noticed that they did not give us any grocery bags and were puzzled by this. We found ourselves carrying our items all the way back that night. Grabbing a shopping cart was also something else; you have to insert a 100 won coin to use it which we did not know. Had it not been for one of the girls we met in the program who told us this goes on back home in her state as well we would of been lost.
        First, in Korea if you want  grocery bags you have to pay for it! Many of the people shopping there did not have any shopping bags instead there's this section where you can pack your things into recycled boxes. We have yet to figure out how this works. Korea is big on recycling ! This might be a reason to why they sell the grocery bags, but I will elaborate about recycling in Korea in another post. We returned to Emart the next day on our own in search for hair dryers, straightners and adapters/ converters for our electronics. From previous research we learned that it was better to buy hair dryers and straightners in Korea than bringing them from home. This is because even if you use a converter it will not work the same, they are pretty much useless. We had trouble finding these items because we thought we could find them in the hair section like back home, but it turns out they're all in the electronics section! The hair dryer and straightner were not expensive at all and work really well. We also had trouble finding the converters, but once we did we even had a more difficult time deciding which to take since everything is written in Korean and though we can read it we don't actually understand all of it. We decided to just risk it and chose one, thankfully it was the right one !

We were concerned about how we were going to communicate with others since we can't speak Korean well especially when it came to paying for our items, but our fears subsided once we actually went through it. At least at E-mart all you have to do is look at the screen for the total and if you want a bag they'll either offer it or you can ask for it by pointing or just saying bag. One thing I do have to mention is that even though it's Seoul you shouldn't expect anyone to speak or understand English. So far we have met very few people who can actually speak it and most of the time they will speak to you in Korean, but not to worry because they will definitely try to help you in anyway they can. People have been so helpful to us it's been great. This first week has definitely come with a lot of firsts, and many challenges, but we're excited of everything that is to come!

Looks like we made it.

It is now Sunday March 3rd and we've been in Seoul for almost a week. To sum up this week I would say it has been exhausting, but AMAZING. In just the few days that we have been here we have been to Insadong, Hongdae, Myeong-dong, Gyeongbok Palace, and many other places as well as boring, but necessary places such as the immigration office. There is so much to talk about, but we'll begin with the flight. We flew from Dallas to Seoul and it sounded pretty scary at first, by this I mean flying for so long especially for two girls who have never been on a flight for that long. Despite our fears, while the flight was long it wasn't too bad. The service was great and the flight attendants would pass by offerring drinks and snacks every 2 hours or so! Also each seat came with a pillow, blanket, toothbrush, toothpaste, slippers, and a water bottle which was great ! We flew Korean Air and we received two meals during the flight which I did not expect. We had the choice of Bibimbap, chicken, and fish; our first meal we decided on bibimbap which was delicious especially for airplane food and then we had bulgogi or beef. They were sort of heavy meals so it would be a good idea to skip one. I was starving so I had both, but not without regret afterwards. They had a good collection of movies and shows both American, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese to choose from. I ended up watching 2 movies, and a Friends episode, but we spent most of the flight sleeping. We have no trouble sleeping during flights, but if you plan on flying for a long period of time (ours was 15 hours) I'd recommend you get something to hold on to or can sleep on such as a pillow. I had a middle seat (worst seat you can have) so having something like that was extremely helpful! I also recommend checking in early and lining up ! We were some of the last to board and it was bad! Once we were in, it was almost impossible to find any open bins for our luggage. Our seats were in the 50s and our carry on items ended up being all the way up in bins 29 and 28. Also stand up and walk around as often as you can because it will really help just being able to stretch and move your legs around especially with jetlag. After our flight we went through customs; many had warned us to be prepared to spend at least half an hour, but to our surprise we went by in just a few minutes! They took our finger prints looked at our passports and took a picture.  We then picked up our luggage which was not hard to find at all and then went on to find our program manager. He recognized us right away and then we looked for an ATM to get some won. We carried some money with us on the plane, but we did not exchange it. We used it for anything we needed while in the Dallas airport which came handy and once we arrived to Korea we withdrew about 300,000 won each about  $276.00 on an ATM. It was a lot cheaper than exchanging money prior to our departure which we learned about after research. We arrived about 4:30pm and since we were going to Seoul from Incheon it took approximately a little over an hour to arrive to our campus. Transportation was provided by our program which happens to be ISA and 4 of us took a cab. From what we saw the fee was about 100,000 won or $90.00 more or less from the airport to Konkuk University. After this we went to Emart to buy any essentials which I will have to make a separate post for because there is so much we learned on our first day in Seoul.