December is here (Week 14)

It's finally the month that everyone looks forward to, but don't want to let go.
December is here.
It's nearing the end of the year, also the end of our one Semester in Hallym University.

We attended a farewell party on 1st December, held by the Buddy program.
We are very grateful to all the buddies. Their buddy system is super awesome. We heard that they match us to our buddies according to our self introductions. How thoughtful is that!

The theme for this time's farewell party is "Black and Red", so we had to go shopping for clothes.
Students from various countries were at the party and they gave touching speech, stating that
"A farewell is necessary before meeting again.", and that "Goodbyes are not forever, they simply mean I'll miss you."

Ok, stopping with the sad quotes. Here are some memorable pictures we would like to remember.

Here is a picture of our buddy with her friend and Sam, the student that will be going to NYP for exchange in the coming semester.

It was the first time in awhile that we met up together and ate. We were all very busy with our school work and could only contact each other through Kakao talk.

We always laugh at how Sam needs to hang out with 3 of us but when he goes to Singapore, he will have 3 of us as his additional buddies.
How unfair haha!
We can't wait to bring him around the island!
There's just so many things we need to do in return and answer!

  

This girl on the left here is our classmate for International Business Analysis.
She's super bubbly and always say hello to us in class. She's really confident and a great English speaker. Her smile is very contagious and she's just really really crazy, just like us.

Here's a video of all the post cards our various buddy wrote to us ;__;

Here's a video of Sam dancing

We took this photo because it was the last finance lesson and we will be having our one and only written exam, THE Finance Exam next week. We have finance class with 2 other Germany guys and 1 other China guy. The class was really fun and our classmates are really friendly and nice! Remember that they brought us to eat FOOOOOOD?

We found this really delicious and filling dinner place! We randomly ordered 2 meals that were for 5 people but we had to try our best to finish our food! There were 2 pizza, 2 pork belly, a salad, a huge bowl of soup and 5 bowls of rice WITH SEAWEED!! It is totally worth the money, it was 11,600 won per person ONLYYYYY !!!!!!! Heh. The amount of food is equivalent to a buffet !


We had pizza with our buddy the next day.
Sam was supposed to join us but he wasn't feeling well.
We even waited for him >:(
The pizza store is called "Pizza No.1" and it's super cheap for a super huge plate of 18 inch pizza.
We only had to pay 5000Won per person!!

WE LOVE THE FOOD IN KOREA!

We spent the weekend in Fake Myeong Dong.
TarrTarr is a new pastry store that opened on 4th December!
They gave a free cup because they just opened. We all want the free cup. We're Asians.
aaaaand, Bingsu. Again.
We just can't stop eating bingsu!
We have to finish the entire menu before we go home. We can try.


The Rilakkuma was caught by Belle at a UFO catcher machine.
Koreans are really crazy over the machine and they're really really good at catching the toys inside. We saw one dude catching close to 10 of them in the same machine.
It was crazy!



Lotte mart is always as exciting. They were selling fruits. Korean fruits. Especially strawberries.

We each bought a box of strawberries back and finished it in a few days.
The pomegranates were also SUPER huge and cheap. Unlike Singapore.










Oh and, we went Skiing with Eileen and Estee.
We fell. Super a lot of times.
Please do not attempt to go to the highest hill, it might give you a concussion.
We fell so many times we don't even know if it hurts anymore. We went back with quite a few bruises HAHAHAHA PLEASE BE CAREFUL

Snow! (Week 13)

Hello hello, it snowed on Saturday!!!!!!!!!!

We ate BBQ with Eileen and Estee again on that day.

That was when we saw snow for the first time in 19 years!
It's super cold but we picked up snow from the bench (in the picture above) and made them into snowball and threw it at each other's shoes hahaha!
The snow kind of felt annoying after while when it started to get heavier.

It's very much like raining, just that you don't get drenched in the water. 

It's week thirteen already. Time flew by so quickly, we were all being caught up in everything that we were doing. We're constantly busy with school work but the days we spent outside of school made us stop to appreciate the fact that we are in Korea, living and breathing in the culture. All the times that had passed were surreal and it was tears and joy everyday. We were sometimes frustrated at our school work but it disperse whenever we take the time to walk to Myeong Dong, or just around the school. There was always time for a breather, something to bring us back to appreciate the culture around us.

Ordering food was never easy. When we learn how to read the words, we were able to pronounce them and tried to order the food in Korean. We appreciate all the staffs and Ajumas for laughing at us, repeating our order again just so we could repeat what they said and learn the correct pronunciation.
We appreciate our teachers for understanding us when we tried to warm up to the school system at the start of the semester. It was not easy, but we managed to adapt to the system as quickly as we adapted to the environment.

Talking was not easy but we gradually learnt how to ask for things, or understood when they told us how much our meals costed. We are grateful to the people who had taught us all we needed to know when we were in Korea. 

Keeping the rest of the sentimental values to week 16, here is some cute cheese that Liang Jing bought in the convenient store.

TSUM TSUM CHEESE W FREE STICKER!!

Belle getting obviously ignored by the cat HAHAHA

:(

Peanut!

Greedy pigs eating snack from Liang Jing's hand

Premium Strawberry Bingsu

It's 12,000Won (SGD$14.60) ONLY!!!!!!

AHHHHHHHHH

Here's a video of 5 of us eating Buffet

Belle: "每个礼拜吃Buffet"

See that? 

BBQ kimchi! Trust us! It's delicious!

Chuseok weekend (Week 3)

Hello everyone! Classes this week only had Monday and Tuesday. Everyone is preparing for Chuseok!

Chuseok (추석) is Korea's longest holiday. It is a major harvest festival and a three-day long holiday in Korea. It's a combination of our Moon cake festival, Grave visiting and Chinese new year.
During Chuseok, they pray and thank their ancestors for the good harvest. On the table, only freshly harvested crops are used - freshest rice, newly plucked apples.
It is also the time for families to get together and talk about their year. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

So, we got our Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and weekends off!
Of course, with such a long holiday, we didn't want to spend all of them up in the mountains.
We went to SEOUL!

Train to Yongsan (lol)

The train ride took us about an hour to get to Yongsan station directly from Chuncheon station. We then took a taxi to our Airbnb which was located just about 10 minutes walk away from Seoul station.

We had allocated seats on the train but were all being split up. I guess everyone is going home for Chuseok.

Yongsan Station!

We spent quite some time looking for the taxi stand when we reached Yongsan. We didn't understand where the arrows were pointing towards. But, we got it.



And here comes the legendary....

REAL MYEONGDONG!

It's like a really really really gigantic Orchard Road with tons of small roads to walk into, with more shops in between. They have all kinds of stores, from H&M to Innisfree, to Shoe stores, to Jewellery shops to Mask stores. It feels like anything and everything can be found here in Myeongdong.


This is definitely the real deal.
We managed to (kinda) finish walking between all the alleys and around Myeongdong.

There was just so many things to look at and so many shops to enter we took a solid 2 days to walk around.

Everyone says Korea is all about the street food. They all smell great everytime we walk pass the stores. They sell a wide array of delicacies. Strawberry mochi, sausages, Ice cream Taiyaki, dried squid, fruit juice, even glass noodles!
It was really hard to just watch when all of the food smells so good.



This was our dinner for the first day >

Why would you open two same stores side by side?
Why not? It's Myeongdong!

Here are some of the street delicacies we tried!

ice cream waffle

strawberry mochi

sausage with cheese sticks

All the food was making us hungry all the time we were walking around even though we had dinner earlier.

It's okay to "dabao".
Just buy everything.

Sneaked a wefie with their cute caps

that Brown is HUGE!

We also found the Line store in Myeongdong!

We went there on Thursday but since it was Chuseok, the store was closed.
We went back the next day, on Friday, and hurrah! It's open!

Line seems to be everybody's favourite. The store was packed with customers, and many people queued up just to have a picture with Brown (picture on the left).

We bought bags full of gifts and little line goods for ourselves.
They were just too cute, we couldn't resist!!
We'd probably buy everything if we had the money to.

Oh! YG!

That night, we went to Lotte Mart, which was near our Airbnb. It's like our NTUC just that it's probably much bigger, with more customers.

Edible fish

They had rows and rows of snacks, even beauty stores like Etude House and Innisfree inside! The beauty stores are smaller, like a pop up store instead of a real physical one but it's the same thing.

It had Toys' R Us, MUJI and Uniqlo on the second floor, and even a pet shop!

not edible fish

they look like mochis

There was a parrot on the lady's hand when we walked pass. It was really cute.

They had fishes, hamsters, snails, beetles, hedgehogs, guinea pigs and birds on sale.

On Saturday, we went to a raccoon cafe in Yongsan! 

We had to order to be seated!

Yes, raccoons. There were 2 black-grey raccoons and 1 all white raccoon.
The main attraction? A small little corgi pup in the store!
Just kidding. But the corgi pup was really cute.

yes, they let visitors do this

The chocolate cake was really delicious and was only for 5000Won (SGD $4.50).

How rare.
We dont have raccoon cafes in Singapore, do we? It's not everyday you get to see raccoons.

They were really cute and fat. We also didn't know that raccoons could climb.

fattest

fat

After the cafe, we went back to being 2000% tourist. 

Seoul Tower! 

Before we went up to the tower, we stopped to watch them perform! It's a kind of traditional performance. The photo on the left was the first. It was very entertaining. It was an uproar as they played the drums while they performed. The photo on the right is a performance for the king back in the Tang(?) Dynasty. It's a martial arts and swordsmanship performance. They sliced bamboo sticks right in front of our face. 

Island is lost in the horizon!

Up on the highest floor, they had an array of glass panels with the names of countries and cities in that direction.
We walked down the aisle and managed to find Singapore!

No, we couldn't see Singapore from where we were (lol).

we tried. 

Here are some of the stunning views we managed to get up in the tower!

Is Chuncheon somewhere there?

Seoul Tower's shadow!

Seoul has a Fortress Wall that surrounds it's perimeter

Our dinner for the night! It only costs 8000Won/person (SGD $7.20)
Best part? It's buffet!

It's getting late here. We have school the next day so, for now! 

Last picture!

Ahem.

Good luck!
Cheers :)