Landfall

My flight touched down late on Saturday, I've spent the time since then trying to rid myself of jet lag and remember how to live in this country. My host family surprised me at the airport, which was great. As simple as it is, having somebody to wave hello when you get into a foreign country makes a big difference.

I'm living with the same family who took me in a year ago, in the same apartment in Daebnag, a neighborhood almost smack dab in the geographic center of Seoul. My host mother's sister returned from Vietnam, where she was working with the Korean version of the Peace Corps, so now there are five people living in the apartment. My host mother assures me that it's not a problem to have so many people living together, she grew up in a home that held her extended family, so she says it's something that she got used to.

After my stomach became a casualty during my first weeks in Korea, I have prepared myself for a diet that shares absolutely nothing in common with what I eat in America. Below you can see a picture of what constitutes my meals. There really is no way to overemphasize the amount of rice people eat here.



What you're looking at (from left to right) is a bowl of leafy greens,the little silver things are sauteed mini-anchovies, fish bologna, kimchi, spicy red pepper sauce, and a bowl of rice, I have rice for literally breakfast lunch and dinner.



a close-up of how you eat the spread, placing small portions of the rice, kimchi, and anchovies into a leaf of lettuce, one bite-size portion.

I walked around the city for a bit today, just to get reacquainted and find out how to get to my workplace later in the week. In case I couldn't pick out the name of my building among the other similar office towers in the neighborhood, it's the only one with a dozen identical black chauffered town cars out front. I'll just have to see how I fit in with the upper crust here.

If I missed sending this blog to anyone who would be interested, please feel free to email the address.

Hold your breath, I'm coming back

This blog will resume in the summer of 2010, more information coming soon.

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!