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.
  

Ambition

It feels like it was only yesterday that studying abroad in South Korea sparked our interest, fast forward a year and we’re only 7 days away from embarking on what we know will be a life changing experience.  Time has flown by, but the process has not been an easy one, from choosing a study abroad program and/or a university that we felt would suite us the best to obtaining a student visa. Although we somewhat expected study abroad to be a challenging process we never fully realized just all that it entailed. Although it can be an overwhelming process we have come to believe as we get closer to the date that it has all been worth it and we’re positive that we will feel even more strongly about it once we are physically there. We were planning to start this blog once we were in Korea, but we feel that it is important to start it now to provide those who are planning to study abroad in the future or who are already going through the process with some valuable study abroad information. Hopefully this will save others some of the unnecessary stress and headaches that can sometimes come with this whole process.  Always Awake will not only focus on our experience as exchange students in  Korea, but it will also consist of as we previously mentioned important  information, as well as tips, and everything we can think of that will be of interest to others! We have noticed that though there are many blogs of exchange students in Korea many of them are very vague on what the process is actually like and are often more personal than informative. We are aiming at making this blog as HELPFUL as possible to others!  We will try our best to update as often as we can, definitely at least twice a week and post many pictures and possibly short videos. Also, this blog will be based on the experiences of both my sister and I and there will be posts written together and others separately, but we will go into more detail on another post. In the coming days leading up to our flight we will make several posts about the first steps one should take when considering study abroad as well as the scholarships available to students and  the process of obtaining a student visa and also a more personal post about us and who we are!   

★Ro & Kai★