KTO at the Danish Travel Show - Ferie For Alle

[Personal]

Hi again and welcome back to another personal post~

Today I want to share memories from last weekend.
Last weekend I worked for the Korea Tourism Organization at the Danish Travel Show Ferie For Alle in Herning!

Here's a Facebook post by the embassy after they dropped by !

It all started some weeks ago when our professor, Barbara, shared a post by the Korean embassy in our Korean Studies Facebook group, saying that the Tourism Organization was looking for people to help out at this big travel show here in Denmark.

It turns out that the travel show is actually the biggest travel expo in Scandinavia and that it attracts more than 60.000 people(!)
Clearly, this was going to be exciting and I was lucky enough to be picked as one of the workers!


The event began Friday morning and I took the train there. Here's a picture I took while transferring. The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) was generous to also pay for my transportation back and forth.

And here the conference center is. It is much much larger than it seems in this picture.

I showed up a bit early and helped retrieving chairs and other furniture needed for our stand. They also gave me a cute shirt.

The whole place was divided into different sections. I know that there was a Camping, Denmark, and two Overseas sections - we were located in the smaller, more exotic one - although it is very possible that there were other sections that I just never got to see since I was busy working.

In front of our stand was the Indonesian one. They would serve food and coffee every day and in that way bring a LOT of people to both of our booths. They also gave us coffee treats. Thank you, Indonesia!

And here is our stand!

The two people in the middle were from two different travel companies that arranged trips to Korea.

To the left is Julia, the other extra worker like me, and to the right, hiding mysteriously behind the fan, is Olivia.

Throughout the weekend, Olivia and I found many similarities between us:

She's one year older than me. She likes Super Junior (2005) and I like SHINee (2008). She has a Bachelor in Korean Studies and I'm taking mine now. My birthday digits make up hers and they are only about a week apart. We have the same humor etc.

And we are now convinced that I am a slightly younger, alternative version of her.

The tall girl the the right is one of Olivia's bosses.

And come cute pictures of us~

♡

When I first came, Olivia told me that the Korean Ambassador was going to drop by at some point.

Not only did he and one of the embassy workers show up, an entire GROUP of Ambassadors from loads of different countries dropped by!

The Ambassador gave us little pins to mark the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Denmark and Korea, and then he and the rest of the group posed for group pictures with the fans we had brought.

During a quiet period on of the days, I had time to check my phone and saw that my mom had sent me a SHINee gif out of nowhere. She's not the most technical when it comes to smartphones so I was really surprised and showed it to the others in our stand. They all agreed that my mom was super cool.

Another stand that we interacted with was the Philippines. They would occasionally make cocktails and do dance performances.

Olivia absolutely LOVED when they played the song we came to know as "It's more fun in the Philippines" and actual ran over at some point to watch.

Another stand we sort of interacted with was Thailand. A nice man working there would always stop for a chat when he passed by our stand and on the last day, while I was closing down, he had his little son greet me and it was adorable!

Moving a bit away from our area, here's a picture from the Camping sections.

And here some other stands from the same hall as us. There were a lot of Safari inspired stands.

Lastly, a few pictures from the Denmark section. I took these around closing time, which is why I was actually able to get pictures with people walking in front of me all the time.

During the weekend, my uncle Kenneth and aunt Connie dropped by! Emilie and her boyfriend came to hear Olivia's presentation on Korea (and gave me a ride home Saturday). I met a girl named Emma, who I first met at Genki 2014, and also Siw, who I went to J-popcon with in 2015 with Jasmin. The world is small indeed.

It was such a great weekend and didn't feel like work at all!

I got to share my passion about Korea and hear interesting stories from adoptees and parents,who had adopted from Korea as well as a few older people, who had been lucky enough to go to North Korea.

And I met some great new people from the KTO office in London since they also cover Scandinavia. It was worth all the time spent there.

Olivia and the office people left in the early afternoon to catch their flight and Julia took the bus home at the end of the event. It would be a while before the next train so I might as well finish up by myself.
When I got out, it was suuuuuuper foggy! I can't believe last time I've seen fog this thick.

I wanted to record a short clip of the train but it ended up looking like a slow-mo explosion.

My city was super eerie looking as well! You could barely see across the street.

The office gave both Julia and I little gift bags with fans, little lavender pouches disguised as hanboks, and a pretty wrapped gift.

Here's the pin magnet that the Ambassador gave us~

Look at the details on this fan

And inside the gift was a mini umbrella!

This was the first time that the Korea Tourism Organization joined the event, which is also why our stand was so minimalistic compared to the others.
I hope they come back next year and if they do, I'll be ready!

~~~~~~~~

And another smaller, personal update.
After the weekend, I had to catch up on some school work and prepare for my presentation in Korean class tomorrow, which is why I've been pretty busy.

Next next week will be pretty eventful as well so hopefully I'll have many more memories to share with you.

As for this week.. well, spring has come! Now, on my morning biking trip to the station, I can hear birds sing!

We had to turn in a small group paper Friday in my other class and our teacher spent some time highlighting good, almost great, and need-more-work parts of our papers in front of class so we could all learn from each others mistakes.
I've had a pretty hard time with this subject 2 years ago when I took it so it was definitely a highlight when our new teacher praised something I had written.
I'm feeling a little more hopeful about this subject.