30 things I've learned since I've gotten to Korea

In no particular order or organization, I bring you my list of 30 things I have learned about Korea since I arrived here 95 days ago. 

1. Korea loves technology. They love to learn, and they really love to work hard, as a community, Koreans just love to work all the time, and improve everything. 

2. People will hate you if you hold up the subway line, even if there are other terminals open, they just stand   behind you, making noises. 

3. Korean people eat SO much. You'll go to a buffet restaurant  order a main course, then go to the buffet and get three plates of food. Seriously. And they snack all the time, too. 

4. It's all about respect for your elders here in Korea, you have to add "-yo" to a lot of phrases when talking to someone older, or use a different, more formal phrase altogether. You also have to bow when you leave the elevator/before you walk away/when a teacher leaves a classroom/etc. 

5. Their phones are huge. When I first got here, I was like..."Is that a tablet?" and then I'd see them put thi hulking thing up to their ear and call someone. 

6. Koreans love little games, my friends in school all play a game similar to jacks, except with little beanbags, and they also play a lot of hand games. This includes phone apps, too. Almost all koreans play this one game on their phone that is called "안니퐁" or Anipong, that they play on the subway all the time. 

7. They are really serious about school here. My friends go from 8am-9pm on weekdays, and they started going from 5pm-9pm on Saturdays (I think, I only go on weekdays, for a portion of the time.) 

8. You always wear a school uniform to high school/middle school. And there are no co-ed classes like we have in the US. 

9.  They recycle everything here, in my house/school they have rubbish bins for every type of trash. 

10.  Ironically, they leave lights on constantly, and they leave the water running, too.

11. Korea is a very nationalistic country. They love Korea, they buy Korean, they think Korea is the best country in the world (and in many ways it is). 

12. The threat of N. Korea is non-existent. Koreans don't worry at all. It's not even thought about, and if it is, it's laughed at. 

13. There are old people everywhere. 

14. No Korean girl thinks she is pretty, apparently, even though it's hard to find a Korean who isn't pretty. And they get tons of plastic surgery here (STARTING IN MIDDLE SCHOOL) to look more western. (more western eyes, nose, etc.) 

15. Koreans are also really insecure about their English. Even students who have ridiculously amazing English  for never even conversing with a native speaker before are terrified to say hello to me because they think I'll make fun of them. 

16. Everyone here is super nice. Everyone always smiles and corrects me really sweetly if I make a mistake. 

17. You use chopsticks and a spoon when eating, but if you look like you need it, they put a fork down, too.  (which I indignantly pushed to the other side of the table until my host family made the waiters stop bringing them, and they stopped doing it at home, too.) 

18. I haven't seen a big truck/SUV since I got here. Maybe because:

19. Their roads are like alleys, or they have 8 lanes. It's either one or the other. 

20. You have to bring you own TP to school. 
       a. If the bathroom does have it, it's outside the stalls. 
       b. Normal public bathrooms only have 1-2 sitting toilets, the rest are squat. 

21. YOU NEVER FLUSH THE TOILET PAPER.  

22.  Korea is really safe, I don't think there's a Korean thief in Korea. Maybe foreigners steal things, but I don't really think any Korean ever has.

23. No one has a shower curtain. The whole bathroom is your shower. 

24. I got lucky and got a mattress, but most Koreans sleep on a mat, or raised platform with a mat on it. 

25. They love convenient stores here. There are GS25's and 7/11's everywhere. But you rarely see gas stations.

26. They eat dog here. Not a lot of people do, but in certain markets, you can go and they have dead dogs laying out, just like any other meat. The dead ones are also right next to cages of live ones. (Keep in mind, on the same street you can also buy fresh duck, chicken, beef...dog is just another meat, albeit less common.)

27. They also have fish markets with live fish, octopus, squid, crab, and lots of other seafood in big warehouse-like buildings. 

28. Lots of old women have rather large carts selling fruits and vegetables that they pull around to different locations. These ladies have to be almost 90, and they're still doing hard, physical labour. 

29. Thirty years ago, Korea was poorer than Malaysia and Mexico, so it's thanks to all of the ubiquitous elderly people, and ladies like the ones still pulling the fruit carts that Korea is now a powerhouse for amazing technology. (If you want to read more on Korea and how they changed their economic standing just google "Korea's economic miracle" as it's known, or read this article from Time: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2029399,00.html) 

30. I love Korea and all of it's amazing-ness. It's ambition as a whole brought it to where it is today, and I love being able to be in such an amazing country, and I think the world has a lot to learn from this little peninsula. 

Public Transportation: Oh, the Angst

So, as someone who had never been in a taxi, on a subway, and had relatively little experience on buses, public transportation was one of those big things I had to thrown into right away. Now that I have gotten used to it, though, I feel like I get so angry with other people who clearly have NO idea what they're doing there.

I just have to get this out.

1. If you get right near the doors at a transfer station (big station to get on trains going in all different directions), you better not step out onto the platform and then stop to look where you need to go. MOVE AWAY FROM THE DOORS or you will be pushed, and if I have to push you, don't you dare look at me like I'm the bad guy, I might miss my train because of you!

2. Don't make the old lady ask you for your seat, yes, I know the elderly have special sections, but those fill up super fast. You're 13, she's 445326, you can stand for the 6 minutes until your stop.

3. On the bus, I go the farthest back. But there's that one middle-aged Korean man who's on his smartphone thinking "Oh, this foreigner is smart enough to work out the buses, but not how to ride them" and thinks he can go farther, thus, when discovering he cannot, pushes me farther up to then take my spot. NOT COOL, BRO.

4. Back to the subway, I get it, you and your boyfriend want to stand side by loving side, but I'm trying not to be more late than I already am, and I'd like to not get stuck behind you when you go half-way up the escalator and then just stop. I would like to continue walking, please.

5. To those groups of teenage boys joking around and talking about me, I understand your Korean, and even if I didn't I can still understand your fingers pointing at me. Thank you for making me think my hair is messed up every time I get onto a bus or subway.

6. When you have a large bag and are holding it in front of you so no one can tell, thank you for getting on the bus right in front of me, and then deciding to move it behind you with no warning whatsoever and hitting whomever is behind you (aka. me) in the eye with it, then not saying sorry. I really appreciate you.

7. To the old men who decide to sit next to me in an otherwise empty metro car or bus, thank you for scooting really close to me, and then making me try and get smaller, while you stretch out and take up enough room for three people. I really enjoy being pinned against the railing/window. It's really a fun time.

8. Thanks to the other foreigners who stare at me more than the Koreans. Yes, I know I'm in a school uniform. You're wearing a puke-green scarf, but you don't see me staring at you for it.

9. I almost forgot to thank all the Koreans for staring at me all the time. Even when I stare back. Really, I enjoy feeling everyone in a bus stare at me for 15-20 minutes until I get off.


I love public transportation, and I love Korea, I just had to get these pet peeves out.

WARNING: the above post might have slight sarcasm.

Almost 3 months...Another Update...Sorry!

I'm sorry! I'll try and be better, I really will.


First of all, let me see if I can cover what has gone on in the past month or so since I last blogged.

It's 3 days away from 3 months.

Let's see, I'm going to do this event by event to give a more detailed summary of how AMAZING each thing was.


         The week after you last heard from me,  I biked around a baseball stadium with my Korean friends (10/19). I went with my whole class, and it was really an interesting experience.I loved it so much! Since we're in Busan, there's not many trails that are large enough for you to take bikes on, and you definitely can't take them on the roads unless you have a death wish, so Koreans share their baseball stadiums with their bike enthusiasts! My class had just finished exams, so as a reward, they all voted to rent bikes and bike around this huge stadium. We biked underneath the stadium, mainly. And one of my good friends even learned how to bike, and it was so fun! I wish I could do that every Friday morning instead of school.

 I also went to an amazing fireworks festival that made me feel like I was in the best city in the world (because I am) (10/28)! It was amazing. As someone who never gets to see fireworks except on Fourth of July, I was really excited to begin with, then factor in how much I love fireworks, and you get an event I'm jumping up and down excited for. And I was NOT disappointed. Busan is really amazing about the whole thing. They do it in front of the diamond bridge on the beach, and it's breathtaking. They go on for an amazing 50 minutes or so, and I couldn't take my eyes off of the light show. It was truly spectacular. And yes, yes that is a bird firework.

  The week right after that, I went to 2 opera concerts (10/30 and 11/3, same week!). One was my host mom's concert. She's a pianist and was accompanying a tenor. It was really beautiful, and the tenor sang in German, French, and Korean. Afterwards, we went to a Korean barbecue thing. It's not barbecue like Americans think of barbecue  it's just what we call it. Basically, they have fryers built into the table, and you cook your own food right there. Needless to say, it's delicious.  We went with a large group of my mothers host friends, and when they sang a traditional Korean song right there in the restaurant in perfect harmony as a group(about 30 people) I was almost moved to tears. It was absolutely beautiful, and so simple and unassuming.  Here in Korea, family and tradition are a big part of their lives, and being let into such a loving and tight-knit community really amazes me. Even though all I could do was sit back and listen to my host family and all their friends sing, I couldn't help but feel like I was part of the group, too.    4 days later, I got the opportunity to go to another concert, this one was with the other exchange students, and included percussion and multiple singers. It was more fun and the dancers broke out into Gangnam style during their final little song, where they sang an upbeat Korean song, and encouraged the whole audience to sing along. Like I said, Koreans really have a sense of community and I'm reminded of it almost everyday, in little ways.  

This past weekend, a week after the opera concert, Korea has a holiday called 빼빼로 데이 (Peppero Day). It's on 11/11 because the ones look like 4 sticks of peppero standing up. Basically, people buy each other boxes of peppero and exchange the with each other. A lot of times it's between boyfriend and girlfriend, but a lot of friends do it, too! (For those who don't know, pepper is similar to Pocky, except better, because it's Korean, and everything is better when it's Korean.) On 빼빼로 데이  I went to a soccer game with my Korean friends. Even though the game ended with no goals, I still felt like I had won at the end. I got to do all of the chants and fight songs in Korean and at half time, they gave away prizes, one of these went to the best dancer, and guess who won a 100USD gift certificate to get their hair did? I did! No one can deny my mad dance skillz now. I'm almost certain it was because I was the only foreigner in the entire crowd and Busan loves foreigners, but let's pretend it's my mad skillz, I like that better. Now all I have to do is decide on what to do with my hair...

Now for upcoming events...

I WILL BE GOING TO JEJU NEXT WEEK (11/22-11-25) I AM SO EXCITED.

Basically, Jeju is this vacation-y island off the coast of Korea and we're going there as a little trip with RYE. I'm so excited because Jeju is supposed to be really beautiful and I can't wait to fly out and get there! And in December I'm going to SKI. I can't wait to do all of this, and I will be sure to do a better job of updating everyone on how I'm doing!

I hope everyone stateside and worldwide are doing well!!