After spending three weeks in Seoul (our final country on Global)), I realized how fast time can fly. Our time here in Korea has seemed especially short, I think, because of the constant reminder that we soon will be going home. It was hard for some of us to fully appreciate the city with the prospect of going home looming over our heads. Although this may sound like a bummer, we still have had a blast in Korea. The food here has been, in my opinion, the best I've tasted in the whole trip. Korean BBQ is just amazing. In some of the classier restaurants in the US, you can ask the chef to cook your meat rare, well-done, etc. But here in Korea, you can actually cook it yourself at the table! I've also discovered that Koreans use flat, metal chopsticks pretty much exclusively, which are quite harder to use than China's round, wooden ones. Kimchi, a sort of pickled, fermented, spicy cabbage dish, is pretty much served with everything and I find it ridiculously delicious.
Until coming to Korea, I have always thought that America's extreme consumerism was unprecedented across the globe. Upon walking around Korea, there are massive amounts of billboards, shops, and people dressed in animal costumes or spinning ad signs over their heads. Plastic surgery is a weirdly big thing here. Men and women have nose and eyelid jobs to make their features look less Asian. It is not uncommon to see Koreans with dyed hair, blond, brown and red. Flip on the TV, and you'll wait at least twice as long as the US for the commercial breaks to be over. I don't find all this particularly disturbing, it's just interesting to me how quickly Korea has been westernized.One day, sitting in the lounge of the global building with a few students, we were approached by a man who wanted us to do some voice acting for $40 per hour! We were quite skeptical at first, but figured out it was a legitimate offer pretty quickly. So, me and one other student (Annika Larson) went to a studio and worked for about an hour and a half, reading off English phrases for the making of a Korean language smartphone app. It was quite an experience!
As far as our housing situation goes, we are in a very nice situation. We have been living on the campus of Yonsei University in the SK Global housing facility. Our family is living in a suite, and although not very large, Julia and I have our own rooms which has been pretty much unheard of so far. The floors are heated. At one point, I came home to see Mom and Julia just lying in the middle of the floor, soaking up the heat. We have some sort of high-tech appliance made by Samsung in the kitchen that looks like a grill, oven, and microwave all mixed together and we still can't figure out exactly how to use it. It sure is fun to mess around with, though.
We didn't have an awful lot of excursions in Korea, but my favorite one by far has the visit to the Joint Security Area in the DMZ between North and South Korea. I've researched it for school, seen pictures of it in textbooks, and we actually got to go there! There was extremely high security and strict rules about what we were allowed to do. After all, it's technically a war zone. We even got to walk in the tunnels built by the North Koreans that the South discovered and blocked off.
Tomorrow, we fly to Beijing, then Chicago, then back to good old Minnesota to soak up the glorious -20 degree weather. See ya'll soon!
-Christoph Hodel
Until coming to Korea, I have always thought that America's extreme consumerism was unprecedented across the globe. Upon walking around Korea, there are massive amounts of billboards, shops, and people dressed in animal costumes or spinning ad signs over their heads. Plastic surgery is a weirdly big thing here. Men and women have nose and eyelid jobs to make their features look less Asian. It is not uncommon to see Koreans with dyed hair, blond, brown and red. Flip on the TV, and you'll wait at least twice as long as the US for the commercial breaks to be over. I don't find all this particularly disturbing, it's just interesting to me how quickly Korea has been westernized.One day, sitting in the lounge of the global building with a few students, we were approached by a man who wanted us to do some voice acting for $40 per hour! We were quite skeptical at first, but figured out it was a legitimate offer pretty quickly. So, me and one other student (Annika Larson) went to a studio and worked for about an hour and a half, reading off English phrases for the making of a Korean language smartphone app. It was quite an experience!
As far as our housing situation goes, we are in a very nice situation. We have been living on the campus of Yonsei University in the SK Global housing facility. Our family is living in a suite, and although not very large, Julia and I have our own rooms which has been pretty much unheard of so far. The floors are heated. At one point, I came home to see Mom and Julia just lying in the middle of the floor, soaking up the heat. We have some sort of high-tech appliance made by Samsung in the kitchen that looks like a grill, oven, and microwave all mixed together and we still can't figure out exactly how to use it. It sure is fun to mess around with, though.
We didn't have an awful lot of excursions in Korea, but my favorite one by far has the visit to the Joint Security Area in the DMZ between North and South Korea. I've researched it for school, seen pictures of it in textbooks, and we actually got to go there! There was extremely high security and strict rules about what we were allowed to do. After all, it's technically a war zone. We even got to walk in the tunnels built by the North Koreans that the South discovered and blocked off.
Tomorrow, we fly to Beijing, then Chicago, then back to good old Minnesota to soak up the glorious -20 degree weather. See ya'll soon!
-Christoph Hodel
