Intro to my blog:
I will be traveling abroad with a few classmates to work alongside Korean faculty, researchers, and 15 graduate students in an animal behavior and ecology lab. They have ongoing research projects on treefrogs, cicadas, crickets, dolphins, magpies, gibbons, and ants. One of the biggest research groups in the lab is the treefrog team. This season we are going to work in the city of Paju, which is north of Seoul, bordering with North Korea. The study locality is a typical rural town in Korea where you have forests and a complex of rice paddies with some houses. We will be living in one of the houses on this site (photos to come).
My blog page will be updated hopefully weekly starting today (May 26th, 2014) and up until I return to the states (August 31, 2014); the duration of which should be about 95 days. My goal is to fill in anyone interested in following my progress in Korea as well as provide myself with a record keeping journal of my trip.
*** I realized after starting to type this blog that there is WAY too much to write about and I'm not trying to write a novel here so I did my best to summarize most of it and include as many pictures as possible!
***** Also for those of you who aren't familiar with this website:
My blog page will be updated hopefully weekly starting today (May 26th, 2014) and up until I return to the states (August 31, 2014); the duration of which should be about 95 days. My goal is to fill in anyone interested in following my progress in Korea as well as provide myself with a record keeping journal of my trip.
*** I realized after starting to type this blog that there is WAY too much to write about and I'm not trying to write a novel here so I did my best to summarize most of it and include as many pictures as possible!
***** Also for those of you who aren't familiar with this website:
- When you click the "Kyle's story" tab at the top, it brings you to this page which is my cover page.
- After reading this page (below), to see other pages of mine, go to the top and when you hold/hover your mouse over the "Kyle's story" tab, a drop down menu should appear giving you individual links you can click to go to different pages of my blog (ie. week 1, week 2, etc.)
Exploring South Korea
Packing Day: 5/26/14
Is it going to fit...
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Well, what was once three months until departure quickly became tomorrow. I've procrastinated up until the day before we leave to pack everything. My suitcase has sat empty on my bedroom floor for two weeks now and finally I was forced to open it and fill it with, stuff. With room to spare ;) Glad that's over - now the fun part: lugging it around the airport...
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....yup; UPS trained me well.
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- Still hasn't quite hit me that tomorrow I get on a plane and am traveling to a foreign country a few thousand miles away to live there for 3 months? I don't think it will hit me until I get off the plane and realize that the majority of people around me aren't American! No turning back now, let's do this!
Plane Ride & Arrival: 5/27-5/28
Have you ever been on a 12 hour flight? I had not until now - probably the most uncomfortable I've ever been in my life, and I normally enjoy flying on airplanes. Even though we were crammed like sardines, there was a nice sized touch screen monitor at every seat that provided games, music, and a decent selection of premiere movie titles which made the flight easier. The TV screen was also fitted with a GPS flight tracker that allowed you to watch our plane gradually progress across the world towards our destination. This was both a good and bad feature considering even after an hour the plane appeared to not have moved much.... The food was what you'd expect airplane food might be like, reminded me of a TV dinner, not great but can't complain.
We left the states on Tuesday at around 3:30 PM from Detroit, MI and when we finally arrived in Korea, it was Wednesday at about 6:30 PM Korean time. The time difference is 14 hours ahead of Minnesota time. It was a bit of a culture shock, but obviously not a surprise, to enter the Korean airport and realize you're one of only a few Americans...surrounded by Koreans. It hadn't really sunk in yet that I was traveling to Korea until that point! We proceeded to take a bus to our temporary "home" in Seoul, Korea for the next few days and upon getting off the bus we began what felt like an endless hike through the streets in an attempt to find our hostel: 24-guesthouse.
Our room was about the size of my freshman college dorm but had some significant differences. There were 3 beds, a refrigerator, microwave, TV, kitchenette, and a full bathroom - all somehow fit into a room the size of a small one-person (American style) bedroom. The electrical outlets are not the same either and we had to use converters so that we could plug stuff in. |