Jeonju University

So Korea so far has been fabulous, although I'm only in day 2. The flight there was brutal, not gonna lie, but so it goes. 6 1/2 hours MIA to LAX, 6 hour layover at LAX, 13 hours in the air LAX to ICN. Then, we got in 5 am Korea time, but didn't get a shuttle to Jeonju (4 hours south of the airport) until noon. So, in summary, 36 hours of travel time.

I have met sooooo many new people, from all over. I just tonight met my first set of Floridians, two girls from Tampa, who went to USF. That was cool. Plus, I've met people from all over the states, some really nice girls from Canada, plus some Brits, a South African, an Australian, and a Kiwi. Sweet, right? Everyone is really friendly here.

The dorms we're staying in here in Jeonju are really nice. They were just built in March and so they're pretty much impeccably clean and organized, which is kind of cool. We have to take our shoes off when we get into our rooms, and I'm getting used to the idea of bowing to people when I see them in the morning or whatnot. The bathrooms are a little different from American ones in that there isn't a separate shower stall or tub, and so the water just kind of sprays everywhere and ends up all over the bathroom floor, and they provide little plastic flip flops to where to keep your feet from getting wet.

Anyways, breakfast lunch and dinner has been kimchi and rice, as well as a healthy assortment of Korean and Western style dishes. Breakfast this morning, for example, consisted of rice, kimchi, salad, pickles, eggs, ham, coffee, french fries (!), croissants and soup.

Today we had our opening ceremonies and a big buffet dinner. The opening ceremony was pretty cool. They had a couple traditional performances (five drum dance, fan dance, pansi) and then they did boring stuff like go over rules and expectations and the schedule. Tomorrow we have our check-ups, which look terrible. We can't eat anything for six hours before we get the check-ups and I can't figure out why. Colonoscopy? haha, I suuuure hope not. At the dinner, they played a bunch of k-pop and I sang along and danced and it was AWESOME.

I miss everyone, although it still hasn't really sunk in yet that I'm in another country and won't see a lot of you again for a looooong time.

It's a relief to have internet though, although I don't have skype set up on the computer I'm using now. We couldn't figure out how to get the internet to work (something about ip address and whatnot. It was completely over my head, and the instructions, naturally, were in Korean), and so I had to run downstairs and get one of the boys in our group of friends to come up and set it up for each of us. He also downloaded something to make it so my computer can recognize and show Korean characters.

That's all for now folks!

Korea is hot.

xoxo,
A