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.

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 !