[WOW Korea] Some must-try Korean Food in Winter!

Winter has almost arrived in Korea, and while the great temperature range in the day is driving me crazy, I am actually waiting quite expectantly for snow since I missed out on it entirely last winter when I was in Japan for my exchange. Another thing to look forward to would be the food! Sometimes there are just some food that tastes better when you have it in certain seasons (like having naengmyeon when the weather isn’t hot yet is just weird), and so here I’m recommending three winter must-haves in Korea!

1. Odeng (오뎅)

One of the most popular must-try street food! Especially tasty in winter. Source: blog.naver.com/neep/120200402604

When Korean street food is mentioned you might think of ddeokbokki first, but when winter comes around odeng (fishcakes) is what people look for! It may seem crazy to be standing out in the cold eating from street stalls like this:

Packing – What to Bring and What to Leave out?

A comeback after a really long time! I always feel apologetic that I don’t have time to post much during the semester because of schoolwork, and during the breaks because I am usually working temporary jobs D: But by request from one of my readers (and new hoobae coming to UIC) I have decided to spend some time talking about packing! 😀

You might be thinking, of course I know how to pack! I just dump everything into huge luggage right?

I wish the story was this simple.

In fact, I hate packing so much that I don’t know if I’m actually the best person to be talking about this. But in any case I will talk about the things you should definitely bring to Korean and things that you don’t really have to!

Items you DON’T have to bring to Korea:

1. Clothes/Bags/Shoes/Accessories

Of course I’m not telling you not to pack any clothes to Korea, but your belongings will only increase exponentially if you bring too many clothes to Korea. (And you will start to get a huge headache when you graduate and think about how you’re going to bring everything home, like me T___T) Reason being that Korea is a shopping heaven. Korea is one country which places a lot of emphasis on fashion, and college students are especially susceptible to such fashion trends. Baseball jackets may be in trend this winter, but next winter you might see everyone in trench coats. It would be best to just buy your clothes in Korea, instead of using your luggage allowance bringing hordes of clothes from home, thinking that you won’t buy anything in Korea. Nope, not gonna happen. Especially when clothes in Korea are pretty affordable too.

Yonsei University

Finally, the post I should have done up loooooong ago, the post about my school!

I shall not talk about all those history and how it was founded etc. Cos it can all be found on Wikipedia (:

Yonsei University is ranked #3 in the Joongang Ilbo Korean Universities Rankings 2012, after KAIST and POSTEC, overtaking Seoul National University. It is the best private university in Korea. It is ranked #114 in QS world ranking for the year 2013/14, and #16 in QS Asia ranking for the year 2013 .

Now that we’re done with the technical parts, I’ll move on to my own experience in Yonsei University and things you should know if you want to enter.

Firstly, I will talk about UIC – Underwood International College. It’s a 4-year liberal arts college in Yonsei. Classes are conducted in English (so no worries for non-Korean speakers), and while international students are the minority (my batch had about 30+ international students out of about 200 students in total) there is great diversity here. We have people mostly from Vietnam, China and the United States, but we also have students from France, Uzbekistan, Belgium, Poland, Iran, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore (me!! hehe) just to name a few from my batch. Senior batches have great diversity too. The Korean students are mostly those who have lived overseas for a period of time, whether they grew up overseas (I’ve met one who grew up in Kenya) or their parents sent them to the States for a year or two to improve their English (apparently this is really common here). So don’t worry about the language part, cos everyone in UIC speaks English (: