[WOW Korea] Day 3 – Jeonju, rich in cultural heritage and delicious street food!

[Transport]: Getting to Jeonju

From Express Bus Terminal station (Line 3 and 7), go to the Honam Line (Exit 8 of the subway, to the Central City Terminal) and take a bus for Jeonju. It costs W14,000 and takes about 2 hours 40 minutes to get there.

Alternatively you can take the KTX from Yongsan station, it costs W32,900 and takes 2 hours to get there. The cheaper Mugunghwa trains would cost W17,600 and take 3 hours 15 minutes.

 

[Attraction] Learning Korean paper art

First activity of the day was learning Korean paper art! We had the chance to make pencil cases from 한지 (Korean traditional paper)! To our surprise, it can stick with just starch water or at least just a little bit of glue ^^ Hanji is one of the prides of Korea due to its durability, where there is an old saying that paper lasts a thousand years and textiles (such as silk or hemp) last five hundred!

Pencil case made from hanji (Korean paper)

It even has hangul on it 😀

[WOW Korea] Singaporean Coffee Shop in Korea?

This week’s WOW Korea mission is to introduce a restaurant with specialty from our home countries. There are not many Singaporean restaurants here, and they tend to be very expensive too so I haven’t been to any of them. So I would instead introduce to you a Singaporean cafe that I have visited a few times!

The first time I saw the word “Kopitiam” (it means coffee shop in Hokkien and it’s a commonly used word in Singapore) while walking along Edae I thought I must have seen it wrongly. But I heard from other Singaporean friends and realised that there was really a “Kopitiam” in Edae!

Kopitiam Singapore Toast and Coffee

They have changed the interior a few times since I started going, but their menu has remained true to Singaporean flavors. It appears to me as a kind of fusion between a Korean cafe where they have the usual Americano and green tea latte, and a Singaporean-style “kopitiam” where we would have coffee or milk tea and some kaya toast to go with it.

Iced milk tea in the summer with kaya toast!

Clearing the Immense Backlog

In a bid to procrastinate when you have a mountain of work to complete (I’m sure many of you have had the same experience), I took the excuse to come back to the blog!

First off, I am so sorry to everyone who has emailed or commented, because I took an impossibly long amount of time to reply you guys. There are some emails even from March which I have yet to reply (Please forgive me!! ㅠㅠ) I have to say that the exchange to Japan last fall semester did allow me to relax a little, but it also made it a little more difficult to get back on track to the academic rigor in UIC… I am now replying the emails and comments so please wait a little more!

On another note, it’s been almost 3 years since I’ve started my life in Korea and in UIC, and I just have about 1 more year left. There are so many things that I would like to share with all of you before I leave, but senior year will probably be crazier than it already is for me now ): I will still try my best to update more often though.

What I have no time to say in words, I shall leave in photos. Spring came really early to Korea this year, temperatures were so warm that the cherry blossoms bloomed exceptionally early this year! (Usually they bloom towards the end of April, this year they were in full bloom in early April!) I took a trip down to Busan and Gyeongju as well since my sister visited, as well as some interesting places in the vicinity of Gyeonggi-do and Gangwon-do (the two provinces really close to Seoul). I hope that these photos will give you a better idea of how life in Korea can be! 😀