I just can't get enough of this city.

At Gyeongbokgung Palace!

Hey again everyone! So I better make this quick seeing as I have only a few minutes before I take off for Yonsei University, orientation and classes starts today and I am beyond pumped! Our days are absolutely jam packed and by the end of each evening I'm absolutely exhausted. Around 10 o'clock last night a few friends and I were gathered in our room and we were just hanging around the room laughing at the bad Korean soap operas on TV and sampling Korean rice wine (note to self: you get what you pay for, 3500 won - aka $3 wine = not even worth it, even the store clerk laughed at us). Needless to say though, after only a short time together we were all nearly keeling over from exhaustion so we all crashed pretty early.

Yesterday was amazing, we had a really delicious lunch in downtown Seoul eating some type of chicken soup. I did my best to conquer it with metal chopsticks and had a great time just hanging with friends: that's Mihir and Anna (my roommate!) below having a toast with what they tried to pass off as "Korean Wine" but was definitely vodka.

Our meal below:The rest of the day we saw the beautiful Gyeongbokgung Palace (as pictured above), had a quick visit to the Korean War Memorial, which is actually the biggest war memorial in the world with over 9,000 artifacts. We wandered around at a market for awhile, which sadly I still haven't found a place to exchange my US bills, so me and my friend Sara (below) just sauntered around. It was here that we were approached by some Korean middle school girls in ridiculously awesome outfits who were apparently running for Student Body President. They asked us to be in a promotion video they were filming, then gave us free candy and took a picture with us, it pretty much made my day.

Dinner at an offical Korean restaurant later that evening was delicious, we removed our shoes and tossed them into a pile of 75 others (causing chaos while trying to find them later), sat on the floor in the traditional style and ate lots of kimchi, bulgogi and rice. Oh and hey! I'm even getting better at chopsticks! Below is Chris, Ben and myself.

I should probably wrap this up right about now seeing as I'm about to take off, the weather is a little miserable over here, cold and wet and it doesn't look like it's going to improve, but that doesn't keep us all from having the time of our lives. If I don't fall dead into bed right away tonight like I did last night I'll try my hardest to update you again before the day is done!

안녕하세요!

Hey Everyone! So as you can see from our little travel tracker on the plane screen above, we safely arrived in Seoul last night at about 7 PM! The flight was a long 12 or so hours but I comfortably managed to snore my way through almost every minute of it. It's around 8:20 AM now and I just came from breakfast in our lovely hotel called CasaVille (What? South Korea? CasaVille? Okay...) Everything seems so unreal so far, we're smackdab in the middle of downtown and just one look out of our window gives us this view:

Incredible right?

We start getting our first official tour in a few hours today seeing things like the Changdeokgung Palace, a War Memorial and the N Seoul Tower and I can't wait to finally be getting taught some official culture points and start being able to fully understand all the new sights that I've been taking in. This is so unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life and I don't think I've ever felt like a bigger tourist but I guess that's why I'm here to learn.

I went wandering with a new friend Sara from Colorado (whom I met on the plane) just browsing the streets around our hotel and we managed to make acquintance with a friendly store manager as I was trying to take her picture and he ran across the street waving and motioning that he wanted to take our picture together and most importantly in front of his beautiful fish store. So we were happy to help him advertise and spend 10 or so minutes in sign language trying to motion on how to use my SLR after he struggled for the longest time, refusing my help, until he realized that it was switched to 'off.' We had a good laugh, said a big thank you and good night to him and headed off on our way, it was fairly late at the time and we both decided to head back after only 45 minutes or so seeing as the 15 hour (eek!) time difference was wearing us down and we thought it best to get some rest.


As for now, some interesting cultural/travel points thus far:

There are swastikas everywhere... At first we were all a bit concerned and asked around as to why they were flying from every corner around the city, but some googling eased my mind as I realized that in Asian popular culture they're actually used to denote Buddhist temples and are a much older symbol then when Nazi Germany picked it up. Still a bit of a shocker to get used to, but thought it was interesting the different perspective this culture has on what we view as such a horrific symbol.

Also, travel point for ladies (and some guys I guess) this is just from my general experience with traveling as a whole, but beginning right now, start learning to love your natural hair. Yup, get used to it. Because no matter what transformer or adapter plug you purchase and no matter what country you are visiting, I have never been able to successfully use a US hair straightener or blow dryer while abroad. Plug it in, it works for about 5 minutes and then short circuits. HOWEVER, if you think it's worth it to visit a market and purchase a local appliance from a store that might be your only hope, but if you're never really planning on being in that country again, 15 bucks on a straightener just for 10 days might be cash that you could have used to purchase much cooler things.

Anyways, so I could write for hours, but I am just itching to get back into downtown and start my adventure. I'll update everyone again as soon as possible and will hope to have some interesting new stories when I return :)

Llamas, Ladybugs & Zoé, Oh My!

It's 4 AM in Seoul right now.

6 Days until I take off at 3 AM for O'Hare enroute to San Francisco and then to South Korea!! I can hardly wait to leave behind this dull dorm cubicle and head out into the world. Sometimes the blandness of Illinois just makes me feel like I'm suffocating due to lack of interesting culture and atmosphere. It's like my oxygen; I live and breathe travel and need to replenish my supply as often as possible in order to stay sane.

In other news, this week has been eventful: exams, singing tests, the weather got absolutely beautiful! Butttt going off that, the ladybugs have also returned, so there has been a mass genocide occurring within my dorm. I tried out Bloomington's public transport system the other day which was a bit shoddy but I guess I've seen worse. I went to the mall to gather some stuff for my trip and ended up purchasing the coolest sweater of my life & became BFFs with the shop owner who was from Ecuador. The sweater has llamas on it, it completes me:

Oh ho hum, what else? I'm applying for a scholarship to IWLS to go backpacking around Kenya & Tanzania and climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in June 2011. Take a look, the trip looks absolutely amazing:
http://www.iwls.com/courses/africa/backpack_africa.html

Aside from that, I think it's about time I clean my room and start getting organized for my trip as well as my last week of school before break sets in! Ciao bellas!

P.S. My cleaning music that I just began blasting, take a listen. Beautiful music video too :)
Zoé - Poli

Spandex City & Northwoods Shenanigans.

Howdy friends :)
So I have just returned from a glorious weekend in Hayward, WI to watch my dad complete his 20th Birkebeiner (34 mile ski race) and I had an amazing time in a beautiful cabin out in the Wisconsin boonies crammed in with 9 other people and 5 hyper-active dogs. I gave handouts at the halfway point of the race to all the skiers in my cabin and then spent a night of celebration with them out on the frozen lake. It was just the amazing, relaxing weekend I needed after mid-terms and even though my dad is really displeased with his score seeing as he hardly trained this year, I'm very proud to say he was 121st out of 1,434. (And for a man nearly in his 60's racing against Olympian and elite skiers, that's pretty damn good.)

The early morning was pretty frigid but so much fun, motivational too actually. Despite my dad's elite racing status, I've actually never been a skier. But seeing this race in person as an adult really motivated me to want to learn. So I do believe this upcoming winter I will try on a pair of skate skis and flop around until I can hold my own and see if in a few years I can try my hand at a few of the amateur races just for fun. In the meantime it was great fun to watch him cross the finish line (in blue in the below picture) and I hope I can be there next year for when he's back in top form to blow everyone out of the water :)


Oh anndd... 10 DAYS UNTIL SOUTH KOREA!!
I absolutely cannot wait to be on the road and living out of my suitcase again.

Attempts to not be a tourist.

Important Topic #1:
Isn't the world beautiful?

http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=4HqcjgJCDuw

Important Topic #2:
16 Days until South Korea!!
Possibly even 15 if I have to ship out a night earlier in order to make it to orientation on time, (which I don't mind in the slightest, extra night in the beautiful San Francisco, heck yes!) :D

So on that note, I got a program manual for my upcoming trip and I'm getting even more excited than I thought humanly possible. It included a long list of tips for this trip, ex:

• Rigid guidelines to follow for our U.S. military arranged DMZ tour (eek!).
• Apparently S. Koreans aren't very fond of toilet paper in public bathrooms and we are supposed to carry it around with us wherever we go?
• Multiple ettiquette rules that we have to follow while at our homestay (note to self: must study to ensure I don't make Americans look like asses)
• And one that I'm most excited about is that they recommend bringing presents to our host families, so I'm going to try and gather some pictures from home & maybe something cute and Minnesotaish as a nice memory.
  Any suggestions would be much appreciated :)
  
  In the meantime I have three brutal mid-terms coming up so I'm off to live at the library till Thursday night and then am excited to spend a trip home w/ the family this weekend, watching my dad race his 20th Birkebeiner & celebrating my sister's 25th birthday!
  
  Over & out. P.S. Amy has been helping me practice :)

Holy Grail of Internships.

H'okay. So. I discovered this Travel Internship online just a few days ago and let me tell you, it was love at first sight for me.
88 days. 8 countries. 6 continents. Getting paid to travel, film and photograph everything you see.
Pinch me I'm dreaming right?
NO SERIOUSLY. IT'S REAL.

The catch you ask? It is probably the most competitive job in the world. To apply you compete with about 700 other applicants by submitting two different videos of your travel experiences, camera abilities and basically why you rock. It's a long shot, but seriously? What have I got to lose? I decided I'm going to apply 2-3 years from now and in the meantime continue to use my camera obsessively like I always do and get better acquainted with my video camera to start filming my entry video.
Check it ouuutt:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8cwnRPhhBU

P.S. I feel entries are boring without photographs so here you go:Whistler, BC - Canada
The World...
Takes. My. Breath. Away.

A first of many...

Hey guys! So I decided to start putting a blog together just as a cool way to document travels and update people when I'm abroad (whenever possible). My next trip is coming up in 23 days to Seoul, South Korea and I'm BEYOND excited. If you're curious, here's a bit more info. on the program I'm going with:

http://www.ciee.org/southkorea/

I also have a European excursion to look forward to this summer! I'll be taking a photography course in Barcelona w/ my school from May 9th - May 23rd, and then after that staying on w/ my best friend since age 4: Jenna Johnston and eurorailing through France, Luxembourg, The Netherlands & Germany from May 23rd - 28th, visiting a friend of mine in Denmark for 5 days and then staying in Ireland with family until our departure back to good ol' Minnesota on June 7th!

Keep checking back here for travel updates, photos & videos! :)