In front of "G" palace after a great day in Seoul

Opening Ceremony for 9th Generation TaLK Scholars

Hey there! I have quite a bit of catching up to do so I thought I would start with the opening ceremony we had on Tuesday. We are staying on the Korea University Sejong Campus in Jochiwon, so we are about 90 minutes south of Seoul. Tuesday morning we headed up to Seoul to the ministry of Education. They introduced all the Presidents and other important people(honestly that was pretty boring) but then they had an awesome show prepared for us. They wanted to introduce us to Korean culture so first we listened to a cute Korean Children's choir. Then we saw the Pangut. That was really interesting and consisted of four people, one playing a very weird sounding trumpet thing, two playing drums, and one guy who sort of did ribbon dancing with his head. It was really good and captivating to watch but kind of long and said weird trumpet thing got old pretty fast. Ok, then came the good part, the K Tigers. They are a professional teenage Tae kwon do group and they were amazing! I've never seen people jump/kick so high in my life! I'm going to try to post videos of all these things so hopefully it will work so you can see which one you like best!

After the ceremony we went to downtown Seoul and were dropped off at a famous palace that starts with a G but I still can't pronounce it. We broke into teams and began a picture scavenger hunt. They gave us about 11 famous places in downtown Seoul we had to find and take pictures at within about 2 hours. That was also really fun! I don't have any of our group photos but when someone sends me one I will post it on here. It was hilarious because there were about 300 of us in very attractive lime green t shirts wandering around trying to figure out where these places were. Luckily a guy in my group spoke Korean so we were able to get to all the places without getting too lost. It was a long, and extremely hot, but very fun day. A good way to get us all ready for classes!

Hello there! Well, I finally made it! I have been in Korea for almost a whole day now and so far I love it! Packing was terrible(maybe i'll post more about that later) but my flight was great. I was so tired I pretty much slept through all three flights! Real quick recap of yesterday: got off the flight and almost died from how hot and muggy it is here. Met some other TaLK scholars all of whom are very friendly. We took a bus that reminded me of Peruvian buses to our university, and the first thing we did was have dinner...side note: if there is a dish that looks like fried noodles in some sort of red sauce, chances are its dried squid. Not my favorite, but everything else was good. The rest of the night I got checked in, unpacked a little and went back to bed. Today a few of us are going to explore the city after lunch so that will be fun! I'll post more with pictures soon! Bye!

This is 3:00 am at the SLC airport ready to go. Thank goodness for Ty and Sarah who helped me pack and rearrange everything or I would have been in huge trouble!