Day 4: Moved into the dorm

On our 4th day in Korea we woke up early, compared to the other days, because today we were moving into our dorm!!

A few days before leaving for Korea, I was added to a group chat for other international students in Seoul. Just a couple of minutes past check-in opened, someone in the chat offered to check our rooms for us before we arrived. This was the moment we found out that we had become roommates!!

What a great start to the day!

Then came the hard part. We actually wore the clothes we had worn the night before because we knew we were going to get sweaty from this. After packing and checking out of the hostel, we carried our luggage all the way down and through the subway. My arms were hurting pretty bad when we came to the last couple of stairs, two elder men stopped and offered their help.
"It's okay, we're okay" I tried reasoning but they had already grabbed Celine's luggage and were on their way up.

At first we got to the main gate and from there we walked through campus and past the hospital.


Thankfully they had a big map near the gate showing us where'ish the different buildings were located.

Here I am gracefully showing where we were at the moment (foot) and where we had to go (finger). Campus is huge, I am telling you.
Also! Fact: Koreans are very interested in us. This middle aged woman came over while we were looking at the map, asked where we were from, and just walked away with a smile when we told her.

Outside the hospital we took a short break to stretch our arms and take some deep breaths before continuing on our quest!

 The way to our dorm was long, curvy, and with a bunch of hills going up and down.

But we made it!!!

Right around this place we met another exchange student, Tina fra Sacramento, CA, who was also on her way to the dorm.

We didn't get much further before a car stopped and waved me over as I was the one walking in the front. It was a professor from our school! He asked where we were from, if we were going to the dorm, and offered his help to find it - all in Korean! I was actually really proud to have this little conversation with him.

He told us that is was probably the right way we were heading, drove up the road, and came back to once again wave me over and tell us that the other way would be shorter and easier for us to go. Thank you, professor!

Check-in was very chill and organized. There were other students but in no way did we have to wait long or anything. We had to do a check (like check yes or no whether the room was clean, if we both had chairs, the a/c was working etc.) and then we could unpack and bring up the bags with bed sheets and whatnot that we picked up in the lobby.

We all got an envelope like this. Thank gosh we brought the right documents to prove that we didn't have TB!

On our way to 6th floor (the sixy floor as we call it) where we'd find our room.

We couldn't see what was inside the bed bags but were warned by an American girl that some of the bags contained straw pillows(??). I thought she meant that some of them might have straws sometimes poking through the fabric and poking people in the heads.

But no. My pillow is a bag with something that look and feels like literal pieces of straws that you use to drink with. Just bigger straws. But my blanket cover is a shiny golden yellow and I feel like a queen.

Oh well.

Our room!!

We unpacked and then went down to Sinchon to buy necessities like toilet paper, a toilet brush, and a broom and dustpan.

Here are some pictures of our new home!

We have a small entrance, like 1 m². There is a 'door' on each side: left is the bathroom with a sink and shower. The one to the right is where our toilet is at. If you continue further inside, you get to the part where our beds and tables are.

Celine called dibs on the left side of the room so what you see here is mine.
We also have a tiny balcony!! Woop woop!

There is so so so much more space than I had even hoped for and the bed is pretty huge for being a single person bed in my opinion. Well, here's my side, unpacked and all.

 This here is from the bathroom! The hallway is narrow so it was hard to take good pictures. And yes, there is no door to the room where we shower in so I'm really happy to share living space with Celine!

Eeey bathroom selfie!

 There really is nothing but a toilet and a bathroom cabinet with a mirror on in the 'bathroom' to the right.

 There are more than enough power sockets and we also have switches to turn on the vents in each of our bathrooms.

 Everything is powered by our magical dorm cards! We use these to unlock our rooms and keep them in this holder to GAIN POWEEEER. Once we leave the room and grab the card, everything turns off.

Right after unpacking we went to Sinchon to look around for stuff, like I said.

We found a bunch of cool things like these Moomins!

And a unicorn perfume!

We spent most of the time in Artbox and Daiso.

Time to find food!

 

The walk to Sinchon from our dorm takes about 15 minutes and we were too lazy to return with the stuff to our dorm only to walk back to find a place to eat. So we ended up dining with our toilet paper.

The kitchen in the place we ate at was not separated from the restaurant by more than a piece of cloth  and there was so much smoke from the food that I had a whole coughing fit when we first entered. But I wasn't alone because the next time they opened up into the kitchen, 3 other girls started coughing as well.

Celine spotted these aprons and insisted that we wore them while eating.

Tonight we ate jjajangmyeon (black bean noodles), mandus, and tangsuyuk (sweet and sour pork)

Our stomachs were full and we had acquired our much needed toilet paper! Now it was time to head home. On our way we stopped to listen to someone playing drums to dubstep. His gear with lined with LED-lights that changed colours constantly and he wore a mask covering his entire face that also lit up in different colours and patterns!

That little kid was in awe!

We stopped once again because Celine had a craving for McDonald's. I don't think she actually ended up buying anything. But at least we got these pictures from it!

Celine looks like a tough street kid and I'm in ad for booty paper.

In the night we relaxed in our room and used some of the face masks I'd brought.

"Well I'm going to have snail secrete in my face and you are going to have... 5 Korean men in your face" - Celine

Including these pictures solely because Celine loves them so much.

This one I like though!

Oh and we also might have had a bit too much fun with today's 'booty'.

We ended our night by going on snack adventures in the night and went to bed waaaay too late.

We found stuff like cheese flavoured puffed corn snack with a chocolate cover, puffed corn snacks with coconut and butter flavour, honey butter chips, bulgogi (spicy meat) cheese hotdogs, and marshmallows with chocolate inside.

I got the marshmallows and was very disappointed. The chocolate tasted like cocoapowder mixed with water and flour.