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scoot-over-yonder · 2 years

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6/1/2022 - Jeju, last weekend

So it's 3 weeks before I go home, and I'm sorry I haven't updated as much as I said I would. I'll have plenty of downtime over the summer to sit back and tell some stories about the things I've done here, so be sure to check back!

In any case... I went to Jeju this past weekend with some other Americans, along with a Korean guy and someone else from another country I think, never did catch where. We rented a car, got some hotel rooms, and drove around the island for a weekend.

In case you don't know - Jeju is often called the Hawaii of Korea. I'd argue it's not; I've never been to Hawaii, but I'd imagine it's a lot less like the mainland USA than Jeju is like the rest of South Korea. It's fairly tropical, yes, but in general the vibe of the place is a lot like the rest of the country. It's more like Florida, except if Florida were its own island, and minus all the crazy news headlines.

The first thing we did was the morning after we got there - we went out to the ocean, rented some kayaks for about an hour for 12,000 won ($10) a person, and got on the water. This is where I began to develop a sunburn.

Next, we went to the beach, where everyone else (who all had swimsuits, I never got around to buying one) swam, while I picked up seashells. This was in the early afternoon, and everyone else was focused on keeping their kids from wandering haplessly into the ocean and drowning rather than picking through seaweed for shells, so I found a lot of good ones. Pictures pending, once I clean them up. I continued to become sunburned.

This was the last major thing we did that day, because the ferry we wanted to catch to our next activity was about to close, and everyone was tired. I got a mediocre, overpriced burger from a brunch restaurant, then we ordered in at the hotel.

It was a miracle I managed to get up and do anything the next morning. I was sunburnt, my arms were so sore from kayaking way too hard that even lifting my phone hurt... I took some painkillers and kept on trucking. Because... today was biking on Udo island.

We got to the island by that ferry we missed out on the afternoon before, and we rented bikes there for 3 hours for 10,000 won per person (~$8) and went joyriding. They were electric bikes that had a top speed of 25 km/h (~15.5 mph), but going downhill I got up to 30 km/h (~18.6 mph). It was a good time. I rode all the way around the island and then some, and I had some peanut ice cream, which I did NOT expect at all that it would be as absolutely delicious as it was.

So good. Not cheap; that little thing was 5,000 won (~$4), but it was just to try. Worth it. I want more so, so bad.

After this, we had to go back to the hotel because I forgot my Korean phone there... but I got it back, and all is well.

Then it started to rain. We couldn't do what was planned for the rest of the day... I think it was parasailing, which I probably would've chickened out of anyway. I wouldn't call myself terrified of heights, but they do make me nervous enough that I'm not sure I could've pushed past it. But we did go to a waterfall, which was nice! I have pictures, but Tumblr says they're too big to upload, so I might make a Google Drive folder when I get home with all my pictures for y'all to peruse.

We got food and went to the hotel after this, and then we all collectively passed out despite having plans to stay up longer... but that just means we needed the sleep.

Came back the next morning, and I had to go to a bank appointment before I even went back to my room... but it's alright, I only had my backpack, and it was even lighter for this trip than it usually is when I go to class :)

I had more thoughts that didn't have anything to do with Jeju, but I'll put those in a separate post later.

Hope y'all are all doing okay over in the USA!

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scoot-over-yonder · 2 years

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4/15/2022 - An addition

There's another recent post below this one - this doesn't build off of that one, I'm just telling you so you don't just read this and think this is the only update.

I figure I should go a bit into life on campus without waxing all poetic and stuff. It's fun to write like that, but everyday stuff's pretty interesting, too.

I live on the far north side of campus, in a dorm that is 15 stories tall. I'm on the eighth floor, and the view outside isn't much. It's really just the city, and it's only really interesting to look at at nighttime when you can see all the lights.

It's quite the dorm building; there's a central part of it that has a lot of shops and restaurants. There's a stationery store, an ATM place, a phone store, a place to pick up parcels, a convenience store, two cafes, and four restaurants (one of which seems to be closed, and another of which is technically a fast food place, called Hansot). I've been in all of these except one cafe and the parcel place.

There's also a little back path to the place most of my classes are, and just a two minute walk from there is an arcade. There's also a small (but very fully-stocked; if the shelves were any closer it'd be difficult to walk around in it) used bookstore, where I got a Korean translation of the entire Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series.

There's also, a little farther away from the dorm on the east side of campus, a place called Mom's Touch, which serves absolutely delicious fried chicken - they even fry the skin! - and a video game store. The fried chicken... there's only one size, and it's about 10 bucks and is enough to feed a small family. I tried to eat it all in one go one time, failed, and hurt for a few hours.

Down that road a bit is a Megabox cinema, which is a lot cleaner on the inside than the rest of the building would suggest, and plenty of bus stops around the area. I haven't found myself planning a trip anywhere in the city yet that takes more than one bus to get to - they're clean, on time (or even early!), come often, and they're easy to use. You get a Tmoney card from a convenience store, give them a 10,000 won (approx. $8.30) bill or two, and they'll put it on your card, and all you have to do is get on the bus, hold your card against a little terminal, and do the same at the one at the exit door before you get off. It costs about a dollar per trip.

Farther from campus, there's another arcade, which notably has what seem to be the only MaiMai games in Gwangju. I've been there recently, and the people who play those things seem to have no regard for the laws of physics or the physical restraints of the human body. I want to get as good as I can at Live and Learn before I have to go home.

There's also a nicer cinema at Lotte Department Store, about 25 minutes from campus. It's on the 9th (out of 11) floor, and the elevator leading up there has a window where you can look out and see yourself ascend over the city.

Back on campus... as for classes, they're nothing too special compared to what I'm used to. The ones I'm taking are all in English (save for the Korean language classes, which are taught using minimal English). I'll go into them a little later, but I have to save myself something to talk about, right? :)

(Again, scroll down a little, there's another new post.)

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scoot-over-yonder · 2 years

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4/15/2022 - On supermarkets

I apologize for not updating in such a long time. It's hard to try and bring myself around to covering all the big things that happen - but really, I'm starting to think it might be because I'm more affected by the little moments than all the "big" things that have happened. I've been to Lotte World, I've been to Olympic Park, I've even been to a club just to see what it's like, but while those were fun in the moment the feeling slips my mind and I'm left with just the stress of not being able to talk about it like I've just been there anymore. I'll get into those things I've done eventually, even if it's after I get home and settled and de-stressed, but for now I don't have many thoughts about those things, more about the smaller things that happen in my day-to-day life. And, well, maybe that'll be more interesting to read about than how I watched a mascot parade at a theme park two months ago.

There are no Walmarts here, for better or for worse. They tried to come here, but Koreans work hard and want their free time to be filled with high-quality things, not the dime-a-dozen plastic wares you'd find around every corner back home. There are equivalents, though; more like Target than Walmart, really. Emart is one, as well as Homeplus and Lotte Mart. I've been to the former two, but I find myself in Homeplus most of the time since it's closer and simpler to get to. It's essentially a small department store with a Target in the basement, except if a Target had a huge produce section, an equally huge meat section (you can purchase most anything you'd expect in a southeast Asian country, from bacon to a whole octopus), and absolutely no crafts section to speak of. There's stationery of course, a lot of it, and they curiously sold harmonicas, recorders, and an ocarina (the second of which I got and, thankfully, the walls are thick in this dorm) in one tiny portion of an aisle near the paper and puzzles.

I had come here the other day to look for embroidery floss. I've been missing a lot of my hobbies lately, whether it be piano or crochet or painting. I had the good sense to pack my art tablet and a couple spare sketchbooks, so I'm not without my art, but I never realized how much I've filled up my life until I had to set most of it aside.

You come to miss these things, after a time. It becomes a part of you, an itch that begs to be scratched. I never sing when I think people could hear me, but I've gone so long without being able to play an instrument that it's the only way I can vent the music building up in my soul. I got so desperate to create something I can hold in my hand that I took my art knife and carved part of an old disposable chopstick into a tiny sword. My drawing's only improved from this - it's really the only outlet I have left, so I've been doing it more and more and putting in the effort to get better at it. But as time goes on, I keep noticing all the little places in my soul that the mundane parts of life back home have rubbed calluses into have started to get tender and sensitive again. I guess that's homesickness, or at least how I've experienced it.

I want to go to Walmart.

This has been the curious thing on my mind the past few days, and it could have been spurred by my desperation to find art supplies. I'm not quite sure. But I don't really want to go there to *buy* anything, or even because I particularly like Walmart, but I keep thinking about the one near campus back home that my family and I would frequent, and the thought of it is oddly comforting. I'm not quite sure what it is about it. It's somewhere I go when I need or want to get something, it's reliable, it's consistent, it's familiar. I understand the layout, I know where everything is, I can pick something up and not have to pull out my phone and open a translator app to know what it is, what it does, what it contains. I don't mind these hurdles here, it's part of the experience, and I enjoy having to problem-solve. It's fun to me, and the novelty still hasn't worn off. But there's a comfort in the familiar, a balm in a little bit of indulgence in that sort of thing while you're treading water in the unfamiliar, and in that same vein I find myself just standing and listening when I hear an English pop song on a restaurant's radio while I'm walking down the street.

There's so much here that's a paradox of the familiar and unfamiliar as well; when I'm in a supermarket or a restaurant or a cinema and I see, say, families picking out meat for dinner, an older man enjoying a bowl of soup, a couple of teen boys waiting anxiously through credits to see the stinger of a movie, I somehow feel both like an observer and like a part of the whole. People are always going to be people, no matter where they are; across even the most vastly different cultures, the differences in manner and language and tradition, there's still really no fundamental difference between us. I think that's what's made it easy for me to feel comfortable here, despite a notable lack of Walmarts, boiled peanuts, or labels written in English.

I really do want to go to Walmart. Even if I have to drive myself there when I get home in a couple months, I'm going to Walmart. But that's then, this is now.

And for now, despite the fantasies of walking down the craft aisle and picking up embroidery floss, yarn, and the tiniest canvases they have to offer... I'm content to be here and do things like eat spicy calamari stir fry and take the clean, reliable public transport here wherever I desire.

(Except Walmart, of course.)

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scoot-over-yonder · 2 years

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Update 3/1/2022

As of this past Monday, I've been out of quarantine 2 weeks. Unfortunately, that's the average span of time it takes for my sleep schedule to turn upside-down when I'm on a break, so here I am, having been up all night and slept all day out of no desire to on my own, likely going to do the same tonight. But at least I'll have classes to force me into a proper sleep schedule, especially since I have an evening Korean class two days out of the week.

It's 9:30 at night the time I've started writing this. I can walk to my room's window and look out and see the bright city of Gwangju, if only just a little part of it. At some point I'd love to go out and walk the city at night; I may be a country baby, but there's few sights I love more than bright neon signs and streetlights on overpasses and life in general still going on even in the deep hours of the night, but due to a certain virus most businesses are required to close after 10, and the buses stop running around the same time. My own curfew at the university is between 1-5am, which is almost a little silly in how late and short it is, but I'd guess it's to discourage people from being out in the city and exposed to danger all night long.

Outside the window is another sight I've found is common on the Korean nighttime skyline - eerie, neon-red crosses atop every church.

My phone's camera isn't great, but you can see two in the image - the obvious one there, and there's also another farther one on the left.

I can count a grand total of seven of these from the view from my window, and while I suppose it is an effective way to signal the location of a church, it's still a little... hm. I don't know. I hate to repeat a descriptor, but it's eerie.

During my time out of quarantine, I've managed to do a lot. One thing in particular was an entire trip to Seoul with some fellow Americans (and I believe one French girl), which will be its own post(s) considering how much we did.

Aside from that, I've mostly been busy. I haven't been able to try much yet outside of Seoul on account of the fact that I know basically zero Korean aside from "hello" and "thank you". However, there is an abundance of the glorious invention that is a lifesaver for not only the COVID-conscious, but introverts and monolinguals, the electronic ordering kiosk. I've been able to feed myself without draining all of my hope in myself using those things, especially getting a spicy soup or fried chicken that I really like from Hansot.

I did go with a few girls to an area here in Gwangju the other day, and while unfortunately I've forgotten the name (I may add it to the next post when I remember/find it), it was a street full of shops. Many of them were names you'd find here in America, like H&M or Burger King or... National Geographic? I didn't know they had stores, let alone in Korea. But there was something that was the highlight of my night, a little hole in the wall that sold corn dogs.

REALLY good corn dogs. So good that I'd love to use stronger language to describe them, but I'm keeping this blog clean. It was a hot dog sausage that tasted better than any hot dog sausage I've ever had back home, dipped in some sort of heavenly corn batter that was so good that I would and did eat some on its own, and that was rolled around in potato chunks and then fried. I never thought I would have a borderline spiritual experience from a corn dog.

Bask in the glory. It looks small. It was not. What's in there was the size of your typical hot dog weenie, absolutely smothered with corndog stuff and taters. I'd dare say it's worth coming here just for these.

We also went to a self-photo studio. There are so many of those here. You cannot escape them. Though, from what it seems, you're free to take as many pictures with your own camera in the lobby as you like, but if you want their little fancy picture machines to do it for you it costs money - but not much; ₩2,000 each (a little over $1.50) was what this studio charged. I got put in the back because I had a lobster hat on. Unfortunately, I'm very short, and they weren't too mindful of me, so it was a struggle to be in the pictures in the first place.

Also, there was a huge plush cat.

It was also my twentieth birthday last week. It's hard to believe I've been alive 2 decades now, possibly because for better or for worse I don't feel a day over 14. Technically, in Korea, I'm considered to be 21 and have since I got here, since Koreans gain a year at the beginning of the year and are considered one year old at birth.

The drinking age here is 19 (18 to us). Yes, I've tried some things, including soju, which was one of the strangest things I've tasted. I also tried a drink that tasted almost exactly like Tootsie Rolls, if Tootsie Rolls were alcoholic.

Strangely enough, a bottle of soju here costs ₩1,200 (exactly one dollar) and you can get it from basically any convenience store. To be more specific, that's less than soda or even water costs here. I'm... a little concerned.

But back to birthday stuff... I had told some of the girls I was traveling with that it was going to be my birthday. I didn't expect anything; I already had my own gift from my mom to open (which was a bunch of cards written by all sorts of people back home, thank you to everyone who wrote one!), but the day after my birthday they came to my dorm with a little macaron with a candle in it and a gift bag. In it was a couple more macarons, a little pack of cotton candy, and a hedgehog plush - I see you glancing at my profile picture; it was a regular hedgehog plush, not Sonic, though it is very adorable. They said they had tried to find something Sonic with absolutely no luck. I have, too. I've looked everywhere. These stores have everything from Sanrio to Peanuts to My Hero Academia to Harry Potter, but aside from a few people recognizing my profile picture or phone wallpaper, the blue blur is surprisingly absent here. Sad!

They did draw him on a sticky note on the bag, though :)

And here's the plush - I've named him Nicky. If you know, you know.

There's more to tell about Gwangju (as well as the Seoul trip, which was so jam-packed that I may have to split it into a post for each day), but this post has gotten a little long, so I'll leave some for tomorrow evening.

I'm sorry for the delay in posting; if I'm being honest it's been hard to motivate myself to write anything about anything lately. But I have a bit of a backlog of things to talk about, so keep an eye out over the next few days :)

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scoot-over-yonder · 2 years

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Quick update: I know I haven't posted anything in a while, and I will, there's just been so much going on and I haven't been able to work up the motivation to write all the posts to get caught up yet.

I went with a group to Seoul last weekend - I'll write a post or two about all of that within the next couple of days, so keep an eye out! After that, I plan to post each day something interesting happens. It may be often, it may not, I don't know exactly. But I'll be sure to post plenty of food and scenery pictures :)

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scoot-over-yonder · 2 years

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First update, 2/8/2022

I know I haven't posted quite yet - I am here in Korea, and I've been trying to get over jet lag and get used to my surroundings.

There's not really a whole lot to touch on yet, besides the procedures I had to go through to even get here, and the food we've been served in quarantine... man are they feeding us well! I didn't eat much yesterday because I was asleep all day, but today... we got spicy beef and lamb soup for breakfast (delicious!!!); a tray full of fresh, crisp fruit and some bibimbap (a bowl of rice with stuff on it - this bowl had some sort of seafood, perhaps octopus, as well as shredded seaweed and some sort of dark meat, with a spicy tofu soybean sauce... it was so good!) for lunch; and a tray of various small servings of food (tempura shrimp, some sort of fish, a little piece of chicken, some seaweed, what seemed to be two different types of kimchi, and some beef) as well as some rice for dinner.

To actually get here, though... after both flights, which were rather uninteresting since the first was so short and the second was spent with the window shut because people wanted it shut, I had to stand in lines for about four or five hours just to get through legal stuff relating to quarantine, immigration, customs, et cetera. I then ended up waiting a couple more hours on a bus, to go wait on a train, to go get on another bus, to go get a COVID test, to get on ANOTHER bus, to finally get to the dorm.

Long day. Glad that's all over. I slept all day the following day, as I said - I needed it bad, and that all is why I'm just now posting this update.

If you want to hear more about the food I eat each day, I can post small updates on that each evening to tell y'all what I got to eat, but other than that... there really won't be much else to say until Sunday! I'm basically left to sit in here and twiddle my thumbs until then.

I may post pictures of the view from the balcony tomorrow, as well as some of the food I've been given; for now, I'm starting to get a little tired, and I'd like to sit back, relax, and play video games :)

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