어서오세요! (welcome!)

Hello everyone, I hope that in this blog I can show you some things I have been doing and will be doing the coming semester which I will be spending at Yonsei university in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

At the moment it is midnight in Seoul, and I am in the university dorm. I arrived in Seoul the 23rd of August. We were picked up by members from one of the many global student clubs, which had organised transportation for us from the Incheon international airport to the Yonsei university campus.

When we arrived at the dorm, we were all placed randomly, in shared rooms. Who would be my room-mate was going to be a surprise. After finding the correct room, I was happy to see that I had been placed in a room with a Korean girl, Yegi.

Having already met the other student from Tilburg university who also attends Yonsei, Vera, at the airport, we decided to have dinner together.
That was a mistake.

Neither of us speak Korean, I can read the alphabet, but have little to no knowledge about the Korean food. I knew that many dishes here are very spicy, but we were starving, and we needed to eat something. So the first restaurant we could spot that had a giant menu outside with pictures of the food (easy, so you can just point) we went in. My Korean friends had often told me to eat bibimbap, because it was a traditional Korean dish, and according to them, very delicious. So we ordered two servings.
Bibimbab (비빔밥) literally translates into 'mixed rice'. It is served in a big stone bowl, with several types of vegetables, egg and hot pepper paste on top of a layer of rice. Meat can be added as well, however, ours didn't have any. You are supposed to mix all of it together using your chopsticks before you eat it, so we did.
We didn't really get to the eating part though, since the dish was, as we could've expected, very very spicy. I had to put my chopsticks down after three bites, since I couldn't take any more.
We exchanged looks, quickly paid the owner of the place, and left.

By now I have found that you should be very careful with what you order here. Just to be safe, I'm going to stick with Korean people for the first couple of days, so I can find out which dishes are safe for us foreigners to eat. I want to try everything eventually, but I need time to get used to the different spices used in the food.


The weather here at the moment is very humid and hot. During the day it reaches up to 32 degrees Celcius. Travelling across campus is therefore a really hard job. Aside from it being amazingly large, it's also very hilly. Every building has air-conditioning here, making it a lot more comfortable inside than outside at the moment.


The first few days here have been packed with introduction activities which were meant to help us adapt to the Korean way of life in an easy way, as well as giving us the proper information for the academic part of our exchange. The day had academic information sessions, which were alternated with games, a taekwondo (태권도) performance and meeting the student clubs which would help the international students.

In the evening, we met our mentor group, or 'cell' which is a group led by a few Korean 'mentors' who will do their best to show their cell the best of Korea, to take them to restaurants, show them around Seoul, and of course to answer general questions.

There is so much left to say about these first few days I have experienced here, but I will save those things for another blog.

Thank you for reading!