... And life is far too amazing. I feel as if I am in an awesome, super-prolonged dream and am expecting to wake up any moment now.
When you prepare for something like this, you begin to imagine that all the worst things will happen: like maybe you will fail your subjects, or your plane will crash, or you won't have access to your money, or you will be super lonely and won't make any friends (the list goes on). Well, rest assured that my subjects are far too interesting for me to fail, my plane made it safely across the Pacific, my money is well taken care of and I have made more friends than I can keep track of.
So, I have been here for ten days and so far I have gone to maybe 12 cafes, 6 restaurants, 5 bars and 1 shopping centre (try and guess where my priorities lie here). I have also scored 20 KakaoTalk IDs and have come home after 4am on three separate occasions. I have also been to the campus convenience store more times than I could ever possibly count (putting a convenience store right below my dorms was probably one of the best decisions Sogang has made financially).
Overall, I am so amazed at the city of Seoul. There is just... so much to do... at any hour of the day...anywhere. I do not like the fact that I could stay here for a whole year and still not get to see/do all the amazing things I want to see/do. For the first few days, I made so many mental notes saying, "right, have to come back here later" whenever I passed something awesome, but by the fourth day I realised that there was just too much and that if I tried to keep track, I was going to have a bad time.
I also have to keep telling myself that I am here to study and that it's okay, therefore, to stay in at night time or to waste a day reading books or hanging with my roommate (not that hanging with my roommate is ever a waste of a day). But then, I also use the Y.O.K.O (You Only Korea Once) excuse all the time to justify crazy and random things that I might normally never do (not like, drugs or anything, just stuff like spontaneously going out at random hours or multiple times in one day or surviving on 2 hours sleep in 48 hours).
I could talk forever about the city that never sleeps, so I will pause here and let you discover Seoul for yourself over the next four months. I plan to document everything of interest here so watch this space!
This weekend is the Korean holiday "추석" (Chuseok), which means that there are no classes until Thursday, and a lot of places are closed until then (I have heard that Seoul becomes a ghost town during this period, which i absolutely cannot imagine nor believe). We exchange students must band together during this time because we are the only ones without family here and all of our Korean buddies will be gone so we will be relying on our own loose senses of direction and mostly instant ramen for food.
It is also my roommates birthday! So we've got a big day ahead!
Signed in Seoul,
Kristin
Kristin is supported by the Australian Government through the Australia-Korea Foundation of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
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