South Korea! First few weeks/Basically the end of classes

안녕하세요! (anyeonghaseyo) Hello people, its been a while. This will be my first post about Korea. Its been a great first couple of weeks so far I am all settled in and well into the meat of all three classes that I am taking, Communication with Korean Culture, Globalization and Economy, and Korean Language I. These classes along with the extra curricular activities I have engaged in have kept me way too busy. I will admit though that the UNIST campus is quite secluded similar to how Ozyegin University in Istanbul was separated from everything. So, the place can get boring pretty easily.

I've gotten fairly used to campus life here at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology. Let me begin by introducing you to my roommate, who was soo eager to be seen on my blog and other things in and around campus.

This is my roommate Byung Ha

He is really good at Starcraft. It's like he has spiders for hands

Byung Ha and Lu. Lu is from China and he is really funny and enthusiastic.

Korean lunch from the cafeteria. It wasn't as spicy as I thought.

This bridge lights up every night on campus and the lights are always changing colors. Adds some nice flare to the kind of boring campus

Some street in Ulsan

Some chicken dish for dinner. I have concluded that slippery noodles are impossible to handle with chopsticks

Popular Korean bingsu dessert. It has some sort of yogurt ice flakes and syrup mixed with fruit.

I guess this is a cemetary up in the hills next to our dormitory. The headstones are beautifully decorated

NORAYBANG (karaoke) I have never experienced anything like it. The culture around karaoke in Korea is completely unlike anything I have seen in the USA

After our first week at UNIST our lovely program coordinator, Minji had organized a temple stay for us. We stayed only for one night (more than enough for me) in a hotel type complex very near to the actual Buddhist Temple, in the morning we woke up for some Buddhist morning ceremony. And we also had the chance to do some interesting yoga-like exercise.

These statues were thought to protect the Buddhist temple from all evil. But of course I had nothing to worry about.

My roommates during our stay (left to right) ChulHee, Tao, and Jihoon. After having a very short 5 hours of sleep we woke up promptly at 430am to catch the sunrise and attend the Buddhist Morning ceremony in which they bow 108 times!

Courtyard of the King's Palace, during the Shilla Dynasty

This statue is supposed to be an elephant and is believed to bring good fortune if touched. Because the Koreans had never seen an elephant this was what their imagination came up with a pig-looking creature with tusks

Water trough filled fresh from the mountains. There was something unique about drinking this water 

Every meal in the temple was vegetarian. Tasted a little bland to me.

Kimchi in the making :)

Some yoga-like exercise. I saw the human body bend in ways I never thought were possible 

My chinese flatmate, Gu treated us to some delicious chinese food in the city center of Ulsan, Sam San Dong

One of the big streets in SamSanDong

I was pretty excited to find this beautiful storefront in Ulsan!

Our second weekend we had a tour of Ulsan planned for us. We visited a pottery museum and even had the chang

World's largest onggi (clay pot). These were used to make pickles, kimchi, or spicy pepper paste.

Ulsan has some delicious Bulgogi (beef meat). You grill it yourself and eat it with vegetables :)

Ulsan is famous for whales and whale watching. Every year the city celebrates with the famous whale festival.

Had some 'Moroccan' food for the first time in Korea

Visited a cat cafe, a pretty normal and common thing in Korea. I will say that it smelled like a big litter box though

We had a visit to Hyundai motors and Hyundai Heavy Industries. It was very breathtaking to see the magnitude of the operations done at their shipbuilding yard

A very beautiful seashore park near to the Hyundai shipyard.

It's been almost 4 weeks already in Korea. I am close to finished with school work. Next week I will be starting my research internship, hopefully it will be a little more laid back. Like I said before expect a little more time between posts as travelling in Korea is a little bit harder and UNIST campus is pretty far from everything cool about Korea

To the Mediterranean Coast of Antalya

Hello all I am sad to say that this post will mark the last of my posts on my experiences in Turkey. I am currently writing from my dorm room in South Korea one week after I left Turkey. I've been a little preoccupied so I have neglected my blog quite a bit until now. Anyway I would like to devote this post solely to sharing my pictures from my holiday in Antalya. Hopefully I will be a little more succinct than my previous posts.

I spent 4 nights and 5 days in Antalya. I was on the same itinerary as one of my friends from Ozyegin University, an Italian international student named Massimo. We spent a majority of our time staying with another international student from Switzerland who is originally Turkish so his family had a lovely home a stone's throw away from the coast. This made our trip very frugal. Basically our days were spent on the beach and our nights were spent walking around the old town, AKA Kaleici.

On our first day we went to a public beach (Lara Beach) that was really crowded and the beach was pretty full of trash. I did not take any photos of this beach just because I felt it was just like any other public beach around the world.

The next day our Swiss host showed us a much cleaner and emptier part of Lara Beach between the big tourist hotels of Antalya.

We found the famous strip of restaurants with umbrellas overhead in the Old Town area of Antalya. We ate here a few times during our stay.

Caught this wonderful family taking a selfie in front of some old gate :) 

This is from a cliff overlooking Konyaalti Beach. This beach is a stone beach so it was pretty difficult to walk bear foot on but laying on the rocks was pretty therapeutic because they were so smooth. I napped for a good 2 hours on this beach.

These cliffs were great for swimming and the view was excellent but it was extremely hard to find a place comfortable enough for soaking up the rays. I wish I had brought goggles with me because it seemed like a great place for snorkeling.

The rainbow at the bottom of the waterfalls. We were walking along the coastline in search of these famous waterfalls named Duden falls. It was definitely worth the extra mile.There was also a bridge were you could walk right over the delta of the falls. 

So that's all I could share with you from Turkey. Please keep your eyes out for my posts about life in South Korea. If you want to hear more about Turkey just shoot me message and I'll be more than happy to tell you everything I could not fit or explain on this blog. I'll be writing to you soon!