My name is Brady Chung, and I am a junior majoring in Economics and Food Science. Currently, I’m studying abroad in my parents’ home country, South Korea, at Seoul National University. I feel that my study abroad experience is slightly different than others. I’m able to speak the Korean language at a conversational level, grew up in a Korean household, and am aware of many of the cultural differences between the States and South Korea. However, some of these cultural lines have blurred for me, making me recognize and experience subtle differences each day I’m here.

One of the first obstacles I faced after arriving in South Korea is that, due to me being a citizen, I had to get something similar to a driver’s license to show proof of where I lived to create a bank account and phone number. However, this required me to go all the way down to Gwangju, about two hours away from Seoul, because of a law that requires you to create this license where your address is set. Although I had to travel again after a sixteen-hour flight, long-distance bus rides in Korea are incredibly comfortable. You have tons of space in the bus, a leg rest, and free Wi-Fi that works well for simple tasks and light entertainment. If you are ever on a long bus ride here, they usually stop at a rest area to allow people to stretch and use the bathroom. There are also tons of restaurants here, and I bought the popular Korean corn dog that cost about 2000 won or $1.40.

The month of September (or October depending on when the 15th day of the eight month falls in the lunar calendar) is also really important for Korea! A national holiday called Chuseok happens. This is similar to American Thanksgiving where families get together and celebrate “the mid-Autumn harvest.” We pay respects to late family members by going to their burial sites and giving food offerings, words, and cleaning their burial sites. This time was really special, but because everyone was traveling outside the city, the traffic was really bad. I got to meet both sides of my family, and on the last day of the holiday break, I saw a comedy movie with my cousins about a South Korean soldier who wins the lottery, but the tickets get sent to North Korea and the soldiers fight over who gets the prize.

Classes start pretty late at Seoul National University. The semester begins on September 1st. My classes happened to all fall on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and all turned out to be 2-4 hours long classes, which can make it hard to focus. However, the professors also get tired of lecturing for that long and give us breaks every hour. There are a ton of chain restaurants on campus if you’re ever hungry. A really unique thing here is the cafeteria. They have a daily menu but one of the items is always discounted for students down to 1000 won, which is only about 87 cents! Thankfully to the amazing support from SNU’s international program, we have domestic students who show us around the campus and can build connections with people who come from different backgrounds. We have weekly dinners as a whole and small group meetings that we create on our own. This week, we split up into groups and went to a Karaoke room! These are everywhere in Korea for a really cheap price. If you want to sing three songs, the place we went to only charged us 1000 won.