This blog has been discontinued, if you have any questions, please email me at olsenh24@gmail.com

Ticket home

I stopped posting about a month before I returned home to America, perhaps leaving some of you with the impression that I was continuing my time in Korea. I am now back in Washington, D.C., preparing to begin my final year at George Washington University.

Coming home has been much easier than leaving, but my memories from Korea have followed me as I spent this summer helping my parents and reconnecting to my life back in the U.S. Every student, before leaving for their foreign school, is warned by the GW Study Abroad Office that the university and home environment they will return to will be different. We are also warned that very few people will understand or be truly interested in what happened to us while abroad, which is only understandable. I can tell me friends and family about the life I led and the problems I encountered in Korea, but there is little relevance to their own lives.

Parting with my host family was the most difficult part of leaving, by far. My host mother and two brothers are closer to me than anyone outside of my immediate American family. I have continued to speak to them through Skype, although it is more difficult to understand each other that way. Being able to converse comfortably with the three of them has become my strongest motivation to learn the language better, more than any benefit it could give me in the workplace or at school.

I have a few more pictures to share from my last month in Seoul.

This is the library at Ewha Women's University, the best women's university in Korea. It was one of the last places I wanted to visit before I left the country. The library looks like the parting of the Red Sea in the old Charlton Heston Ten Commandments movie. Flanking the thoroughfare are eight stories of library. My longtime Korean tutor gave me a tour of the campus, after which we got plates of dokpokki hot enough to bring me to tears and said a final goodbye at the subway station.


This same picture is now sitting on top of my desk at school. The next day my family drove me to the airport and said goodbye. I am sure I will see them again.

Visual Errata

I have some photographic proof that I've gotten outside of Seoul a few times over the past weeks. I actually visited Jeonju, a city in the rural south of Korea that was hosting a film festival and paper clothing fashion show that weekend. Both were interesting, but I had a better time just getting to know some of the other foreign exchange students who came this semester. Among other interesting moments, a student I met from what used to be East Germany relayed the persistent distrust within his family of West Germans, not boding well for North Koreans. The same guy mentioned, probably more strongly than he intended, that a large reason why American prospered postwar was because of how it attracted many of Europe's brightest minds, I'll let you decide the merits of that claim. Another student from Kazakhstan added to my idea that people from former Soviet states are very friendly and make for good conversation. She spent a great deal of time arguing with anyone who brought up the Borat movie.

The Jeonju city tourism board paid for about twenty exchange students to go on the trip, hoping we will return to our home countries and sing the wonders of their city. It's actually a nice place to visit, they certainly try hard.


Jeonju is famous for its traditional-style paper. We stopped at a store that sells nothing but immense reams of colored paper.


Korea has a lot of very nice coffee shops that emphasize exteriors like this one. It's common knowledge among business people that looks matter at least as much as the content of the service that you provide.

Fastforward a few weeks later, I went hiking with a group of older Koreans that I've met, all of them foreign correspondents who love to finish off a hike with a pot of rice wine and pass out for a little while. They get a kick out of the fact that I like hiking with them and I learn a little about what it's like to be a journalist here.


The guy on the left specializes in North Korean affairs for the Korean Broadcast Station, the man on the right works as the Korean correspondent for Nippon Hoso Kyokai, a Japanese television station. They hike like it's a meth addicition, preferring to wake up at 5 and finish when most people are barely reaching the top.


I am in front of a boulder that looks a lot like a rhino, there are a strangely large number of rocks that look like things at the top of Korean mountains.

In case this blog has taken on the appearance of a catalog of Korean mountains, the reason is that they are some of the more photogenic places I go on weekends here. I finally realized that the reason why Koreans can claim to have the best mountains for climbing is not because they are the most beautiful, but because they are very easy to get to, summitable in one day's time, and offer their own social culture, like golf. I should start calling it Korean golf...

Until next time, hopefully I will have one more decent update before I leave for America at the end of June.

Sorry to have my posts become sparse once again, here is another editorial of mine that was published in the GW Hatchet. I will try to have a more interesting and picture-filled post up soon.

My graduation! (just kidding)

A short time ago I helped a friend of mine celebrate her graduation from my Korean university. She actually has one semester left, but there is only one graduation ceremony a year, so I went to that one. Well, actually, I didn't even go to the ceremony. Apparently just taking graduation pictures and wearing a cap and gown is more important than hearing any speeches, so I just took pictures with my friend and her family for two hours. The whole campus was filled with seniors doing the same thing, all dressed up with nowhere special to go.

That's me, So Yoon, and her boyfriend Han Young. The strange triangle-shaped structure to the right is the most famous bit of architecture on campus, the main gate to the university. All incoming traffic passes under it; it actually spells out the initials of my university.

Hmm, I didn't realize how much taller I am than her family, normally I'm only a little above average in Korea. It's hard to see, but we were surrounded by families taking the same pictures on campus. People spend a lot of time buying clothes and coating themselves in makeup for this day.

Yay! I Graduated!

Long Hiking Trip

So last weekend I decided to work on a promise I made to myself at the start of the new year. After traveling outside of Seoul for a few weeks, I realized not only how much else there is to see in Korea, but also how good it felt to get out of a crowded city for a while.

With this in mind, I woke up one Saturday morning and decided to leave. Thankfully, my host brother was able to help me in planning my exodus from the city, and a few hours later I had a destination and a place to stay in a tiny town in Woraksan National Park.

Taking off from a bus terminal on the other side of the city, I found out just how far you can go for about five dollars. It turned out that my destination was so far off the beaten track that the driver was willing to call up the owner of my guesthouse and personally deliver me to where I needed to go.

The bus terminal I left from in Seoul.

I ended up in a town that couldn't have had more than a few hundred residents, almost all of them catering to the hiking tourists who come to the area. The peak of Mt. Woraksan overlooked my guesthouse, letting me know just how hard the climb would be as I went to bed on Saturday night.

If you squint really hard, you can see my guesthouse, it is the rightmost building.

The couple who owned the place where I stayed that night were really nice. After finding out that I was a foreign student and that I could speak a bit of Korean, they told me I reminded them a great deal of their own son currently studying in Canada. The husband himself was very interesting, a former globe-trotting architectural consultant who had decided to build his own guesthouse and settle down into retirement.

Insisting that I had to eat dinner with them rather than try to find my own meal in town, they proudly served up American beef flank and got down to what older Korean men do best with new friends: drinking.

Despite the bitter cold, I couldn't have been happier as I mixed bites of barbecued potato and beefsteak in with a bit of what I think was brewed from tree branches, I'm still not sure. Surrounded by the owner and a group of hikers also getting ready for the climb tomorrow, they collectively laughed at whatever I had to say and asked me to explain how I ended up in one of the more deserted corners of the country.The guesthouse where I stayed.

The next morning I woke up as early as I could, as the entire hike would take about seven hours and I still had to get back to Seoul that evening.

Korea has been pretty barren and gray for the past four months, so my pictures may seem rather lifeless. Still, the emptiness and feeling of being on the mountain were great. The pictures are in chronological order as I sweated, jumped, and clambered my way to the top of the mountain.

The town was full of extremely alert guard dogs, as everyone was sleeping, their barking was the only thing I could hear as I started up the mountain.



A bird and I take in the view from the top.

The stone on the top says "Woraksan peak, height above the sea 1097 meters"

The only other people on the mountain with me were older Korean hikers, in the full hiking uniform, loud and happy to be outdoors.

Recently I got a super short haircut, my friends here either laugh and say I am trying to look like a soldier or they genuinely didn't recognize me at first.

Waiting for the bus back to Seoul, the bus stop consisted of a sidewalk, zero signage, and an older Korean women who would point people to where the bus stopped. It was great.

For me, hiking is Korea has been a great way to remember the parts of myself that I forget living in a giant apartment block and never seeing green things. Lunging over steep inclines and sharing a dinner in the midst of a quiet winter night reminded me of a lot of things I miss about Redding.

The trip was also a great way to end my vacation and get ready to begin my Spring semester, kind of like a deep breath before I went back underwater.

48 Hours Filming in jeju-do

After filming a commercial for Korean tv here and having it never see the light of day, I was nervous about telling many people that another channel had contacted me for a program. But I just got back from 48 hours in Jeju-do, the same island of the south of the peninsula that I traveled to a month ago. Along with another American student, I spent two days going all over the country filming a travelogue, and as I found myself saying too often on camera, "it was a great time."


Going anywhere with a camera crew is strange, and it felt like a different island from the first time I went there. The best record of the trip is going to be the show when it finally comes out, (I hope!) which should be in about a month. Until then, the full extent of my public embarassment and fooling around in front of a camera will have to remain hidden.

During the course of our days running around the island, they had us riding horses, touring on a great yacht, eating urchins fresh from the sea with some of the island's freediving old women, and finally, meeting up with a hiking club for some mountains.


Meeting the older women (called haenyo) in particular was a great time. These ladies pluck urchins and octopus and all manner of fresh, crunchy things off the seabed and serve them up right on the beaches for tourists. The women above is pouring some hotsauce to be added to fresh seaweed, much better than you might think.


Weirdly enough, the woman who showed us how to ride horses spoke the best English of anyone on the island. That's her in the helmet.


The hiking club was thoroughly surprised that I and the other actor could speak Korean, and spent most of our time together asking about how we managed this seemingly impossible feat. Every time I travel and meet Koreans who are floored when I speak more than a few words, I am reminded that the bar here for white people knowing the language is very very low.

Here is a picture of all of us after we got back to Seoul, the guy on the far right is the other actor, named Paul. The man and woman in the middle are Eung Jeong and Cheol Hoo, our producers. They shepherded us around the island and provided the single piece of acting advice, "act naturally!" like anything that I did was natural to me.


(it occurs to me that we look giant in this picture compared to our Korean producers, they were a little bit shorter, but the difference is more a result of perspective when the picture was taken).

latest Hatchet article

Hello, this is a link to the latest article published in my university newspaper, The GW Hatchet. I am discussing a trip to an expatriate bar in Apgujeong, one of the more upscale neighborhoods in Seoul famous for its plastic surgery clinics.

If anyone who reads these pages ever has a question, just post it and I can provide some more details^^

Travel part 3-Jejudo

The final stop of my cross country trip was Jeju-do, an island that is a three hour ferry ride from the south of the peninsula. Jejudo is normally about ten degrees warmer than the rest of the country, and is the only place that could be called tropical.

Jejudo is famously known in the rest of Korea for three things, stone, women, and tangerines. Stone because it is a volcanic island, replete with carved statues of the ancient residents. Women, because Jejudo for a long time farmed shellfish from the ocean floor as a means of survival. Diving for shellfish, which was done with just a knife and a pair of lungs up until recently, was a job that women were thought to be biologically better suited for, increasing their importance in the community as breadwinners. And tangerines, because there are an unbelievable amount of the things growin on the island. Hanging on tress next to the sidewalks, overflowing roadside stalls every mile or two, we were even given a crate as a desert gift by the owner of a restaurant we visited.




While I did enjoy all of Jejudo's three famous attractions, we spent more time among the natural beauty of the island. Watefalls that pour right into the sea, tumble-down sandstone cliffs, and when the snow got too bad, a great botanical garden, (the trimmed pine trees).


There was one strange stop we made on the island, a replica of the ship that carried the first Europeans to Korea. After learning about a group of Dutch sailors who were imprisoned for a dozen years by the isolationist government, we walked around the nearby cliffs and saw what might have been a shop dedicated to the Netherlands, I'm not sure. The sign is talking about the Netherlands, and I get the windmill, but I'm not quite sure how dinosaurs or a boxing Nixon represent the country. Nearby was proof that the Vikings even pillaged Asia, further testament ot the prowess of the Danes.

Yes, that is an amusement park ride.

my travelogue Part 2

So... continuing my post from a month ago, here is the second part of my trip around the country. There are a lot of windy, barren views in these pictures, but the countryside isn't nearly so lifeless. About three months from now the whole countryside will be a brilliant green due to all of the rice fields.

After heading to Andong, which is a very traditional area near central Korea, my mother and I continue our drive.

Yeosu is a port city that is just about as far south as you can go on the Korean peninsula.

Fishing trawlers lined up off shore to enter the port city, and silos clustered around where they would later dock in the city.


Nearby the city were a few secluded beaches, which looked like they would have been great during the summer. The picture above shows fish drying on a line by one of those beaches, they're abandoned during the winter.

This little guy jealously guarded an old farmhouse by the beach, up until my mother, with her deep for all things dog, convinced him to come up to us. It is very rare to see dogs in Korea, most of the ones in Seoul are strays. Unfortunately, eating dogs is still pretty popular among older Koreans and in certain traditional areas. I took care to avoid showing my mother those traditional butcher shops.

Spicy red peppers are used in literally 90% of all dishes in Korea. The above sacks were about as big as my whole body, deposited outside of a kimchi store near Yeosu. We bought some bulk kimchi there for my host family and for my mother to take back to America. There literally is nothing more Korean than Kimchi in my mind, extremely potent, always available, and not easy for foreign palates at the first bite.

One last picture of Yeosu at night, this is near the hotel where we stayed.

오바마-"Obama"

In honor of the Inauguration, which I was quite sad to miss, here is the link to the GW Expat article that I wrote back in November. The article was published two months ago, but I never got around to putting it up here.

Travel around South Korea, Part 1

Hello y'all, been busy during the past month with the end of the semester and having my mother visit for two weeks. Rather than returning to America, I decided to explore my adopted home country instead.

Starting last Thursday, we rented a car and braved the roads of South Korea. Korea gets very different once you leave Seoul, going from millions of people jammed into the metro to valleys populated only by ancient apple farms.

From this:

To this:

The trip started out rather inauspiciously, stuck in the elevator of the rental car building. To make matters worse, it was Christmas morning, but we still managed to find an elevator repairmen who could get us out of there.


Our first destination was a famous mountain in Korea by the name of Seoraksan. The mountain attracts bus loads of mountain-climbing old people from all over the country. Despite it being a particularly cold time of year, we managed to get to the summit and see a great sunrise from the nearby beach.


Seoraksan is in the upper southeast corner of the country, by the end of our trip we would be as far in the southwest as possible. In between, the weather went from snowdrifts to palm trees, then, weirdly enough, back to snowdrifts on the supposedly tropical island in the south.

Seoraksan is actually part of a mountain chain that contains buddhist temples, famous waterfalls, and immense columns of rock. We were only able to see a few of the sights, but every hour spent in the open rather than in the apartments of Seoul was priceless. It's hard to realize just how closed in a city is until you finally escape it.


Finding a motel by the mountain and getting around by car was the beginning of a long period of being forced to speak Korean with strangers. The bad news about walking up to strangers was that they assumed if I could ask for directions, I could understand whatever rapidfire answer they shot back at me. The good news is that saying just a few words in Korean to people in rural areas is pretty astonishing, after saying nothing more than, "how do I get to the hotel?" you might have thought that I just recited poetry from the suprised and appreciative responses I received.

Traveling outside of cities in Korea also brought me in contact with a lot of older people and children who have seen very few white people. The kids were cute about it, staring open-mouthed and running over to their parents once they laid eyes on me. The older people were less endearing, mainly glaring at my mother in I with looks that ranged from surprise to disdain. I'm used to both reactions, but it was harder for my mother to get used to strangers being much less friendly than they are in the U.S.

I'll finish up with a shot of lakes in Korea, taken by Andong. Later on, we traveled to Yeosu, Mokpo, and Jejudo, that'll be for another post.