Missing and Hitting the Wall

Three girls are dressed in redhead outfits, while singing and dancing against a background of giant mushrooms and green hills. Through the speakers a loud beat is keeping the bus awake. We are the 8.00 pm group, who just arrived at the Incheon Airport and are now heading to the residence halls of Korea University. Throughout the whole ride music clips from different K-pop groups are shown on the television and I am not sure whether the Koreans think this is cool, or whether it’s some sort of practical joke. Outside the first lights appear of a the city that will be my home for the upcoming four months.

I guess I should be excited.

Unfortunately, the place where you normally feel this excitement – the belly – is still a battleground of different bacteria, trying to obtain a dominant place in my body. (and making me want to die from time to time). It is nice to be out of China, since I spend the last days there mostly on wooden planks they call beds, with an exception on Friday when I managed to join the group for a trip to the Olympic park. I could not join them to the Great Wall though, something I still regret.
Also, it is nice to be finally done with the suspicious looks of hundreds of officials checking your passport, luggage, flight card, visa, credit card, luggage again, fingerprints and luggage.

>Is this your bag?
There is a knife in this bag
Walk with me please. Give me your boarding pass and passport

So yes, I guess I am now internationally known as someone who tried to get a pocketknife onto a plain. (Funny that it has been in that bag for about two weeks and that every time I entered the subway in China, I had to put that bag through a scanner, with no reaction whatsoever.)

In Korea, everyone seems very nice and welcoming. As long as you keep to the rules of course: strict gender segregation, no alcohol, no female visitors after 10 pm. Well, that’s the rules for my new dorm. I live in the Anam Global House, a newly built building that opened on the day we moved in. On the first night, I also met my new roommate Jenny, a German girl who is very nice. On sunday she joined J, D and me for some shopping and drinks, and dinner in the afternoon. Because my stomach was doing a bit better, I gave it a shot and drank my first Soju! It was actually quite okay, a sort of watered vodka, and mixed with beer it’s even better. But after that, tiredness took over.

Monday was the first day of introduction, so it was mostly waiting, listening to information talks and meeting the buddies: “oh my god, we should like so go clubbin!”. I guess it’s all very nice, but at that moment I still felt very tired and sick, so I had a hard time enjoying it all (and clubbing was the last thing on my mind). Two days in Seoul is very short and it seems that everyone is getting around language wise, made tons of friends already, and feels totally at home, while I am kind of culture shocked and just a physical wreck. Suddenly I missed everything from home: my friends and family, my bed, UCM, the privacy and the food. In short: I was super homesick.

But things were about to change.

After a good night of sleep, I woke up feeling much better on Tuesday. I was able to eat breakfast again, finally with some cereal! Although the day of introduction was again only waiting and filling forms written in Chinese (okay, Korean, it seems the same to me), I felt much better. I also had a good time with my buddies (Samantha from Korea, Mikaela from Finland and Kerdija from the US).

And the night hadn’t even started yet.

The buddy system is called KUBA (Korea University Buddy Assistents), in which international students and Korean students are mixed into social groups of around 90 people. The main purpose of these groups is to make social bonding easier. And that involves a lot of alcohol - a lot. So yes, since my belly finally works again, I was able to join everyone for Beer and Chicken. And it gave me so much energy! I could party with everyone and had such a great time. Koreans are super inclusive so everyone felt at home right away, and so do I. And I met so many nice people! While Korean students living on campus have a curfew (11.30 pm), the international students are free to do what they want. So after midnight, the streets around the campus (mostly bars, restaurants and convenience stores) are filled with KUBA students trying desperately to walk up the hill back to their dorms. Yesterday night I was one of them.

I still miss my friends a lot, I can’t help it, I just really like my little cozy life in Maastricht. But after yesterday I am much more confident about my time here in Seoul. The text to my dad in the middle of the night sums it up quite nicely: Korea is great!

p.s. A special thanks to Lisa Dupuy’s gift: A clockwork Orange that god me through my many hours of boredom! And indeed is a good read :)

p.p.s. I now have a Korean number and a Korean address: Feel free to send me messages and packages (filled with dropjes!)
nr.: 01059400183
address: Room G419-2 Anam Global House
Anam Residence Life, Korea University
Anam-dong Seongbuk-ku
Seoul 136-701, Korea

p.p.s. with regards to fl(cr)ying babies: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/airlines-offer-no-crying-sections-2013-08-23