So one of the most creative events held by the SNU buddy program so far was definitely the Food Festival. For every event, students are paired with one Korean buddy and three foreign exchange students. For this event we were required to meet at least once before the actual event, and hopefully at least 3-4 times before the event. So my group had three foreign girls and a Korean boy and we decided to meet on Tuesday, with the event being held on Saturday. Our group turned out to have three extremely chaotic and lazy people, and one person with too much motivation. Out of the four of us, one of the girls was from Switzerland, and after I introduced myself and said that I Bangladesh she got really excited and told us that she dated if it Bengali boy for two years and managed to learn a lot of Bengali recipes. So, after seeing me she got overly excited saying they were going to make Bengali food and she was so sure that I definitely would know how to make something – jokes on her because I am a disaster in the kitchen. SNU’s buddy program gave us a $30 limit to buy our ingredients and we realized that there is absolutely no way we could buy all of the spices and meat for any Bengali food. So then we decided that on Saturday we would figure out if we could buy spices and spend under $30 and decided to make tacos as an alternative.
On Saturday we met around 4 PM and went to Emart to buy ingredients and because we didn’t want to pay out-of-pocket we made sure to buy the cheapest version of everything – we even bought our tortillas in small sizes because the bigger ones are pricier. We figured that since our Korean buddy lived with his parents and since we were using his kitchen we wouldn’t need to buy basic ingredients like oil or salt and pepper. We ended up going just a little bit over our $30 limit and bought ingredients for $36 and walked to our Korean buddy’s house. Somehow I got roped into doing the main cooking which involved cooking the meat for our tacos. So out of the 4 of us, one of the girls came almost an hour late so she missed the whole shopping part and by the time she came we were almost done. So I did the main cooking, the Swiss girl did all of the cutting and the other girl and the Korean buddy helped us eat! We cooked for about 45 minutes at most and spent the rest of the night engaging in conversation. Since the SNU buddy program makes a group chat for every event everyone was posting pictures of what they made, and after looking at everyone else’s dish we were kind of embarrassed because we chose such an easy dish to make. But then again none of us were great cooks to begin with and didn’t really want to put that much effort so it all worked out.
The safety and security of Drexel students is a priority for the University. As part of the efforts to support Drexel students that are studying abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Office of Global Engagement has conducted a rigorous review of programming and provided additional support to participating students with customized pre-departure orientations and regular check-ins during the required self-isolation period and the term.