It is now October which also means midterm season! I had two exams for two out of my four exams. The whole second week of October was mostly spent on going to cafes to be productive and study. I am a person that cannot be productive for a long time and therefore had to constantly go out to a cafe to study.
One of the first things I was shocked about coming to Korea was how big cafe culture is. I did know from before that cafes were very aesthetic and popular and it was one of the reasons why I wanted to come to Korea. However, I did not realize how many coffee shops and chains there are. On my first day in Hongdae, I realized that I saw three Starbucks all within close proximity. I also learned there were other coffee shop chains like Holly’s Coffee and Twosome. Many of these coffee shop chains actually have floors of space for people to sit to study or to just chat. It was also very shocking to see that many people in Korea commonly go to a cafe or a coffee shop just to sit and chat for hours. Aside from coffee shop chains, I have also noticed that many bakeries also provide a large studying space with many outlets. A bakery I like to go to a lot is called Blanc, it is right by our subway station and it provides seating with outlets and lots of options of bread and pastries to choose from for a pretty reasonable price. I have stayed for many long hours to be productive and get things done. Another place I like to study specifically by Ewha is a place called Ewha Dabang. It’s always filled with students studying and it even has a nice view of the campus. The drinks are a little bit more on the pricier side however, they provide outlets and lots of desk space to study. The owner is very nice. During our first visit, he lent us extension cords to use because it was super busy and there were no seats that had an outlet nearby. There are also a lot of similar places near other universities like in Sinchon, where Yonsei University is located. Another usual place I study at is a boba shop chain called Palgong Tea. My friends and I like to go study there a lot because it serves the cheapest drinks and of course boba. I even did one of my midterms there since the midterm was online. Overall, I feel like the cafe culture here is divided into two categories, one is for study focus like Starbucks, Holly’s Coffee, and Twosome while the other is more focused on the cafe itself. What I mean by this is that people visit these types of cafes because of what the cafe is known for. It is usually because of aesthetic picture-taking spots or specialty foods and drinks the cafe is known for. In rare cases, it can overlap where people can study at more aesthetic cafes but many of these cafes even have signs that don’t allow any computers or studying. This is why I have not visited the many cafes that I saved in my list, drinks were much more expensive than I thought and many cafes also require every person to buy a drink to sit in the cafe even if you are only there for their pastries and desserts. Still don’t know how my midterms turned out but now I am excited to go do more new things after spending a good amount of time focusing on my midterms.
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Chuseok weekend just ended and I wanted to share the activities that my friends and I did over the weekend + other big activities that are popular in Korea. Chuseok (추석) is Korea’s Thanksgiving! It is a big holiday in Korea where families meet up to spend time together. It is a long-observed holiday, it was from September 20th to the 22nd, but many already started celebrating from the weekend on the 18th. During this time, my friends and I decided to do full-day activities since they did not have classes during the holiday.
Gyeongbokgung Palace / Wearing Hanboks / Bukchon Hanok Village On September 18th, my friends and I rented out hanboks (traditional Korean clothing) and visited Gyeongbokgung Palace. We were there for a total of 5 hours
Lotte World / Wearing School Uniforms The next big activity that we did during Chuseok weekend was going to Lotte World! We went on September 20th. Lotte World is also known as “Korea’s Disneyland”, an amusement park in Seoul that is both outdoors and indoors for all ages. We were able to directly go there from Jamsil station. Before going in, we rented out school uniforms to dress up as students at Lotte World.
N Seoul Tower Another famous location my friends and I visited previously was the N Seoul Tower, used to be called Namsan Tower. Me and my friends and I made a last minute decision to go in the afternoon which worked out very well because we went right at sunset.
Today, I wanted to share about the course registration process for Ewha courses and also other sources we have to do through Ewha.
It has been around a week since I’ve gotten out of quarantine, and I have learned a lot on how to do things. Overall, I felt pretty prepared, I was relieved that my self-taught Korean speaking skills were working. However, I really regret not teaching myself how to read the Korean language, Hangul (한글) before I arrived in Korea. In this post, I wanted to list and explain important things that I wish I already knew about before coming to Korea.
SIM Card: Getting a Korean phone number is very important, especially with Korea’s COVID-19 regulations.
Trash System: Korea is very specific with their trash!
Discount Apps: Klook and Trazy
These things were the things I wish I was a master at when I first got out of quarantine. I hope these tips are helpful!
Reserving through Global E&S Something extremely new that was needed to figure out for my study abroad was the mandatory two-week quarantine in order to enter South Korea. I landed in Korea during the second week of August and completed my quarantine towards the end of the month. For exchange students, since we were long-time visitors that needed a visa, we were required to quarantine on our own. Therefore, Korean universities all partnered with an organization called Global E&S, and all exchange students were recommended to reserve their quarantine through this organization. The cost was even a little less than the average price of quarantine stays, and we were able to pay beforehand before our flight. Once again due to the high number of students that were traveling to Korea on similar days like us, these quarantine spots filled up very quickly, so I highly recommend immediately booking it once your flight is confirmed. Each school had a different limit amount of spots for quarantine, and therefore I knew a few people who had to reserve their quarantine through other programs. The quarantine price at Global E&S also included all meals, the two COVID tests that you take, and a Korean sim card. We had to pay transportation costs separately on our last day, one for the taxi from Incheon Airport to the hotel and the taxi fees for the two COVID tests so make sure to bring Korean cash or have a foreign-friendly credit card to be prepared for these costs. Having a Korean sim card was pretty helpful in some ways because the wifi at my hotel was at times very weak and for other students that I met, they used it to order food delivery if they did not like the meals. Daily Meals For the meals, I personally was okay with it, there were some days where I did not enjoy it as much, however, I was pretty happy that they were overall pretty balanced. For breakfast, they would usually get bread and bento boxes with rice and soup for lunch and dinner. A bigger issue for my food was that the portions of these meals were much larger than what I usually eat and therefore a lot of the food had to go to waste. For drinks, they provided around thirty water bottles and provided many juice boxes and milk boxes that they will give with their meals. No Trash Pickup Continuing with the food waste, our hotel did not take away our trash until our check out day and therefore I had to separate food trash and clean all of the plastic containers that our food came in to reduce smells as much as possible. The hotel recommended flushing down our food waste, but I did not want to risk clogging the toilet and therefore mostly collected my food waste into containers and only flushed liquids like the soups and the milk boxes. Highly recommend cleaning them out daily before they start to smell and become extremely gross. At the end of quarantine, my room was filled with trash bags and other bags that had washed plastic containers and utensils.
My Experience...
Now for how my quarantine experience was…aside from this one issue, it was pretty okay. This issue exclusively only happened to my room. On the night I got to my room I realized that my bed was covered with lots of fine black particles. I was so confused at first, and still to this day do not know what it exactly was. Then I saw the area right to my bed was also all covered in black particles but they were even bigger pieces. They were extremely fine and would smear if I tried dusting them off. Eventually, I found out that they were coming from my AC, and every time I turn on the AC, the same particles will fall on my bed again. Not knowing what to do I called my parents and they ended up calling the hotel staff to ask to get a new room. I also saw other dirty spots that had things like hair and food crumbs. I did not expect the room to be 100% spotless clean, but at this point, I felt extremely uncomfortable staying in this room for the next 14 days. Even though I felt bad for asking for a new room, my parents were also worried for me because those black particles could have possibly been mold or ashes. However, the hotel staff said that I could not change rooms and told my parents that “your daughter has high cleaning standards” and so I could not do anything about it. How I Went Through it In the end, I could not get my room changed nor get it vacuumed. The only solution they had was to give me new sheets to cover over the particles. I was very thankful to bring cleaning wipes and a lint roller because these black particles could not be dusted off, a lot of force was needed with the lint roller to completely remove the particles. Every time I turned on the AC I had to avoid my bed for a good twenty min and then I would use the lint roller to take off any particles that would get on. Overall, I did enjoy the relaxing time alone, however, I could not fully be comfortable in my room during my time in quarantine. However, my favorite thing about my experience was that I got really lucky with the view from my room. I enjoyed looking at the sunset every day and often found myself just sitting by my window looking at the view. Other things I enjoyed doing were catching up on TV shows and exploring all the channels on the TV, watching new reality shows and dramas that I have never seen before. It was finally departure day! My flight was at 2:05 pm, and I was very grateful to fly with many of my friends and classmates, resulting in us being a group of eleven students from Hawaii flying to Korea to study abroad. The boarding process and the flight itself went very smoothly, I was more worried about the procedure after we landed. Due to COVID-19 precautions, I researched that many documents were required and it was quite a long process to go through all the different stations before we could get to our luggage. During our flight, we received four documents to fill out that were required later on for the landing procedure at Incheon Airport. Four forms were given during the flight:
With the large number of international exchange students that were entering Incheon Airport on the same day as us, the after landing process took much longer than anyone expected.
After leaving immigration we were finally able to receive our luggage. It was 12:00 am by this point and the area was so empty, our luggage were the only ones left. Once we finally got out, we went to a table that had a Global E&S staff member who was handling all of the taxi rides to our respective quarantine hotels. This once again took around another long wait, as there were a limited number of large taxis that were coming back and forth from Seoul to Incheon. After a long wait, I was finally called to go and arrived at my quarantine hotel around 3:00 am. I was still not the last one, as my other friends let me and other people go first. In total it took over seven hours to finally reach my quarantine hotel, very relieved I reached here safely!
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