Wow, time sure flies! I can’t believe it’s been 16 weeks and my time as a Hanyang student has come to a close! The last week was spent cramming for finals and finishing up the loose ends of final presentations, so it did not leave for much time for a last minute travel around Seoul. However, my roommates and I spent Thursday night together, after two of us came back from our last final, for one final night of fun before parting ways.
Just wanting to get out of our suite for a bit, we headed to Dongdaemun History and Culture Park to eat, play a game of bowling, and explore the area one last time. Since it was going to be our last dinner together in Seoul, we of course had to choose a Korean meal! Afterwards, we found a place to play a round of bowling. Despite being downright terrible at bowling and getting gutter-ball after gutter-ball, we still had a blast, laughing at our misfortune and enjoying each others’ company. We ended up playing two rounds and then headed out to experience Dongdaemun at night as my roommate was delaying her inevitable packing. Even though we were only a 5-10 minute walk from Dongdaemun, I never actually spent much time walking around. I must say I missed out on a lot and it was quite a shame that it was our last night!
Anyway, as this is my last blog post, I would like to quickly reflect on my experience! In terms of academics, I think Hanyang has a great program with challenging and engaging classes, but wasn’t too difficult in which you would be spending countless hours trying to study and complete work. There’s plenty of time to travel around Seoul and have fun! Seoul, in general, is such a beautiful place and has tons of activities to try which will leave you engaged! My favorite places to go were Myeongdong and Hongdae as they had the best city life environment with endless amounts of food to try. I was also able to take part in a couple of KPOP related events to see two of my favorite groups which was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip!
The one thing I think was the most challenging of living here was the recycling system. In the USA, we usually just separate the trash from recyclables, but here in Korea, they take it one step further and they have places for basically anything (e.g. vinyl, paper, plastic, food waste). It was really confusing to figure out what went where and it really took some time to get used to, but became way easier as the semester winded down. Of course, the language barrier made things quite difficult, but wasn’t as bad as I initially thought it would be; many people speak English well enough to help the foreigners get by! Overall, I really enjoyed my time here and I cannot wait for the next trip back!
If you made it to the end of this blog series, I hope you will consider Korea as a choice for your own study abroad experience and in the future, I hope I will read a bunch of blogs about others’ experience in South Korea. Until next time Drexel study abroad and Korea! It has been a pleasure! 🙂
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