2016 Highlights!

AaAaAaaaaaaAAH IT'S nEW YEAr IN JuST A FEw hOUrS!*

*in UTC +1 at least. For those of you living in time zones ahead of me, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Also, before I start my post I'd like to say THANK YOU!

I saw just now that my latest blog posts have gotten a lot of attention lately and it really made my morning! I very much appreciate that you take your time reading my 'work' and I'd just like to say that I'll work hard to put more effort into my blogs in 2017 so I hope you will hang around to witness it ^ㅂ^

Now the post!

I was ready to write off 2016 as the worst year in my life so far because this last part has truly been THE WORST PERIOD I CAN REMEMBER RIGHT NOW. 

But then, while taking a thoughtful shower, I remembered having read about our brains' negativity bias. I can't explain the exact reason why but it's something about our brains remembering bad things better than the good ones on a 1 to 5 scale. Meaning for every bad thing happening to you, you need five good ones to even it out.

So after the past two months of having very few peaks on my emotional rollercoaster going almost straight south, it's no surprise that I'd think like this.

I'd hate to look bad on 2016, though, and think that I wasted an entire year on being unhappy. Was 2016 really that bad? I thought to myself. Wait... was it this year Celine and I went to Korea? Yes! 

And then all of a sudden my mind was filled with happy thoughts!

All the major good memories from this year came back to me and now I'm sitting here, my spirits lifted as much as they can be given the current state of things.

I've seen many of my friends say the same (especially in our class group chat as I'm writing this post) and it's all over the internet: 2016 was a horrible year for some and a lot of us are ready to just leave this year in the past. But before we do that LET'S NOT FORGET THE GOOD MOMENTS WE HAD. Let's re-discover and treasure these so we can have a happy start of the new year tonight!

Now that my long intro is done, I'll share some of my highlights from 2016!

Celine and I went to Korea!

I actually have yet to finish the blog posts about this ;-; That'll be one of the first things on my to-do list next year!

But yes. Celine 씨, my awesome classmate, and I had been talking about going since we were going to have a 1.5 month winter break and that it'd probably be a good idea to go around January to maintain the Korean we had learned so far as well as enjoy a cool trip together. And it really was an awesome trip! We did a lot of interesting things and our friendship grew a lot stronger after that. Like I said after going to Paris with Maria in 2014, the saying "friends who travel together stay together" really is true!

Although I have no blog posts about our adventures yet, I did manage to make a video with all of our recordings that I am actually super proud of!

Aaaand I went to Korea again!

In June I went back to Korea and this time all by myself. It was a milestone for me to reach since I had never traveled completely alone like I did this time. I arranged everything by myself, flew alone, and stayed alone. Or actually, I shared a room with 3-4 other girls at a hostel but we never went out together. At this time Jasmin was still in Korea so we got to hang out! Also Philip and John were still living in Seoul at that time so I got to meet them as well AND Kong, which made me really happy ~☆⭒

When they were busy I went to explore on my own or have a beer with people from the hostel. I made a couple of new friends got to speak a LOT of Korean, which was also one of my purposes of going. I even met a student from Yonsei, one of the universities that my own university has an exchange agreement with, and he ended up giving me a little tour around campus.

I was actually there on my birthday and I truly enjoyed being able to spend my day surrounded by some of my best friends ♡

Yuki visited!

In August my good friend Yuki from Singapore came to visit!

He was going to stay with his aunt in America for some time and decided to drop by Denmark for 3 weeks to hang out with us ^_^ When I say us I mean Chris and I because Yuki stayed with us the first week to save expenses. We went out and around Copenhagen to show him the city and enjoyed watching him return to child stage once we entered the LEGO store. It was also hilarious to play "Yuki tries to pronounce Danish words!"

Every night we had movie nights back in the apartment.

Yuki is one of my most supportive friends and we always talk about how it could be fun to perform together or have model gigs together. Aaah, some day~

Comic Con Copenhagen!

For the first time ever, Comic Con came to Denmark!

Until short before the event, the hype train had been going at full speed. I mentioned in an older post that I was going to be cosplaying Tinkerbell as part of a big princess group but I never heard from them again. I don't know what happened to the project. I had been working hard on my cosplay, though, and wasn't going to let all the hours I spent on it go to waste. So for Comic Con I went as Tinkerbell, J-me came as Fire Elsa and Starfire, and our other friends Andreas (maid café), Kristine, etc. came as Ratcliffe and Pocahontas one day and had a whole Asterix & Obelix group cosplay going on the day before. Somehow Jasmin and I met a bunch of other Disney princess cosplayers and decided to walk around together for a while and people LOVED IT! They took SO many pictures!! The girls we talked to were absolutely amazing and since then we have kept contact.

Even while on our own, our cosplays brought us more attention during those two days of the con that I think I have gotten my entire life. One day we spent half an hour moving 5 meters because people stopped us for pictures and interviews. We were interviewed for several websites, filmed, and even in the newspaper after the first day of the con!

The amount of support and.. .admiration from others (especially towards my wings) was just so overwhelming. I felt so appreciated and it sparked the flame in my cosplay heart!

GEEKcore + became a J-Popcon trustee!

GEEKcore was also a great time!

I think that was actually the best con I have had this year. The con was smaller than last year but the people were just as awesome. We had the best maid café team I could have ever imagined with both known and new faces! I had convinced Chris to join as a butler and after the con he was all over the place! He'd expected nothing from the con but fell in love with our team as well. I can only hope and cross my fingers that our next con, J-Popcon 2017, will include all these FANTASTIC people and that we will have such a great experience together again!
This year, Allan, the owner of GEEKcore wanted the café the be game themed. So we had a very talented girl make Portal cakes. Once these babies sold out, Andreas handed Jasmin and I a pen and then we proceeded to run around and write on every poster for the café that the cake was a lie!

I wanted to include this other highlight under this point because they're both cosplay related. I don't remember exactly when but this year I became a J-Popcon trustee!

It means I have more responsibility now within the maid café and that I am one who can take over control of the café in case our leaders are busy!

Writing contest in Vienna!

The Monday after GEEKcore, Celine, me, and a 4th year Korea student, Charlotte, flew to Vienna, Austria to represent our university in an international Korean essay writing contest hosted by Sungkyunkwan Univeristy! I actually did write about this on my blog so I won't go into too much detail. It was an interesting experience and I felt like my knowledge in Korean was challenged greatly. Spoiler: we didn't win. But I would still go again and have a second chance if I could!

Attended a charity event

One day in class I got a message from one of the princesses we met at Comic Con, Stine. Someone she knew was hosting a charity event and they had asked her to ask a few cosplayers to come by and entertain the kids there and so she'd decided to reach out to me, Jasmin, and a couple of other Disney cosplaying friends of hers. 

Being part of something like this was another goal of mine. At events like this I feel like all the time I spend on cosplays and research pays off in ways that I could never have dreamed of before. I hope to be able to participate in more of this in the future!


Nominated for exchange by UCPH + scholarship
As a Korea student it should come naturally that we'd like to go abroad and to do that we'll have to apply twice: the first time we apply to our own university, the University of Copenhagen, to hear if they will send us overseas. If our application is accepted, we'll have to apply to the foreign university that our own university allowed us to apply for. When we wrote our application, we could write 3 priorities. For my first priority I placed Yonsei university as I had been interested in their subjects and the school itself. A few days before Christmas our applications had been processed and I got a mail back saying that UCPH has allowed me to apply to my first priority AND that I had been selected to receive an Internationalisation scholarship - something that we were told about a third of those applying for exchange would receive.
Celine 씨, Isabella 씨, and Johanne 씨 all were allowed to apply for their first priorities as well (Celine 씨 and Isabella 씨 for Yonsei too!) and it turned out we had all received the scholarship!

Went to Sweden!

The ray of light in a dark time. From December 25th to 28th I went to Sweden and stayed with Philip. Those were some of the best days I've had in a long time. A lot of stuff has been happening with my family the past two months and when I've felt like no one understood me and the world was against me, Philip was there to talk and comfort me. I cannot even begin to describe how great it was to 'get away' even for just a few days. I also made a new friend so that was kewl. Shout out to Joar!

Things haven't gotten better at home since I returned but on the day I left, I felt like I had more energy to tackle whatever I was going to be met with.

I can only hope he understood how grateful I was for his help ♡

And that was my year!
Now it's 5pm and I'm still in my pyjamas so I will end the post here.
Please enjoy the night. Come to terms with whatever bad things you've been met with this year and embrace yourself for 2017!
Here's to hoping that 2017 will only get better!