I’m a student from Mizzou currently studying in Daegu, South Korea. I am the first ever undergraduate student from Mizzou to go to this school. I have met a lot of people from all over the world. I have made friends with people from Kazakhstan, Ireland, Poland, Germany, Croatia, China, Japan and France. Here are my favorite moments from my first month in South Korea!

This building is the Administration Building. According to my Korean buddy who helped me get settled, I should go there “if I have any problems whatsoever.” I haven’t gone inside it yet but I walk past this building a fair amount of times when I walk to my classes. Luckily, the classes that I am taking are only around a 10 minute walk from my dormitory. I walk past this building to go to my calculus and biostatistics classes.

This is one of the parks on campus. Walking past the Administration Building and taking a left, you will walk past this. I sometimes like to walk through or past this park to my dorm from my beginning Korean language, cinema and culture classes.

This is a selfie of me on top of Mt. Polgong. It is known as Palgongsan. San in Palgongsan means mountain! It took me two and a half hours to hike to the peak. I also ran into wild mountain goats on my path to the peak. I was astonished. I couldn’t believe that these mountain goats were so close to me and they were wild. They looked like goats on a farm back in Missouri. They were black, short and they looked like they were climbing the mountain with me. On the peak, I was exhausted. I decided that I should take the cable car back down. It was slippery on the way down as I fell twice! Luckily, I wasn’t injured. I only got my butt soaked from the ice on the ground. I took a 1.6 kilometer trail to the cable car and went back home by bus. The buses here in South Korea are great. The bus drivers make you feel like you are on a roller coaster sometimes. They can take wide turns so one better hold on to the railings. It can also be bumpy. One the way back home I was bouncing up and down while sitting down in my seat. It felt like my dad was driving me in the countryside when I was younger. When he would drive down hills fast and I would get that feeling in my gut that I’m floating. I believe everyone had a similar experience growing up. The bus drivers are almost like that.

I went to Seoul for the weekend. I visited this statue of King Sejong. He is super famous in South Korea. He is responsible for me being able to read Korean in around two to three weeks. He created the Korean alphabet known today as Hangul. Most Koreans believe that he solely developed the Korean writing system although there are other theories that others helped him. But he, alone or with help, created this writing system around the 1440’s. Although I was around 580 years too late, I still wanted to say thank you.

This is a picture of my best friend (left) and I (right) at the DMZ. In the background of this picture is North Korea. This is the closest my friend and I will probably ever be to North Korea in our lives. I remember talking about going to the DMZ with him in our AP human geography class back in high school nearly four years ago. I have known my best friend since kindergarten. We essentially grew up in the same town together. He is studying abroad in Japan for a year so he flew in from Tokyo to spend a week in South Korea with me and check out South Korea itself. Before I came to Korea, I also visited him in Japan for three weeks.

Fun fact: While walking around, I met a new friend named Derma from China. He told me how he traveled to North Korea before coming to South Korea. This blew my mind. As an American, I will never have the opportunity of going to North Korea. He said how it was a totalitarian government and the military was everywhere. He also said he couldn’t take that many pictures because of how controlling the government was of photography. I went out with him to a few Chinese restaurants. They were phenomenal. American-Chinese food has nothing on authentic Chinese food. Authentic Chinese food is amazing. I thought that Chinese food was alright but my experiences of eating Chinese food in Japan and Korea have made me appreciate Chinese food a lot more. I think that Chinese food is now one of my favorite cuisines now.

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Learn more about this blogger’s study abroad program: Kyungpook National University