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.

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.

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.