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!

Kap A Doh Kia

Hello everybody! Like I said in my previous post I am sorry for the delay. A post about my Kapadokya trip is long overdue. Honestly, one of the reasons why I have put off posting this for a long time too is because of the difficulty filtering through the pictures and choosing which ones to include here because it is soo hard to describe the experience I had in just words and pictures.

Before I jump into the meat of my Kapadokya I trip I would just like to mention that one day after work we had gone to Taksim Square for dinner and encountered this peaceful protest on Istiklal Street.

Riot police were on standby in the off chance that peace turned into violence. I was smart enough to stay clear of any of these activities.

Now onto my weekend trip to Kapadokya. We (Boming, Jennifer, and I), the 3 Michigan interns at OzU spent two days there. It took 12 hours by charter bus to get to and from there. It was not so painful to go by bus because we were able to sleep for a majority of the time.

Day 1:
We arrived in the Kapadokya region in the morning and checked into our hotel. We were pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of the two guys that ran the hotel along with the beautifully decorated terrace.

cool old-fashioned key to our room :)

The hotel was conveniently named Terrace Hotel. We enjoyed a breakfast cooked by our wonderful hosts on the terrace. This accomodation ran us around 33 TL per night which was around $15 per night per person.

Our hosts were very helpful in helping us figure out the best way to make the most of our short 2 days in Kapadokya. There were two tours that were the most popular (red and green tour) and each one took basically the whole day. So it was decided that the first day we spend exploring places on the red tour and on day two we spend exploring the green tour. Our host mentioned that it was possible to do the red tour by scooter so I decided to rent one because it was cheaper than a guided tour and more of an adventure

On day 1 I completed the red tour without the help of a guide by scooter and on day 2 I was advised that the green tour was too much driving and harder to complete by scooter so I did a guided tour instead.

Rocking the vintage style helmet :)

The first place I visited was Çavuşin, a small but beautiful mountain-side town. Here you could find a beautiful landscape with a mix of cliffs, desert, and old mountainside cave dwellings.

After cavusin I rode up to avunos which was about a 20 km away. Other than the famous pottery there wasn't much else worth seeing so after looking at very collerful and exotic potter we headed down to pasabagi and zelve

This was a cave church. Talk about simple. 

Open air museum in Zelve. You can explore the cave houses carved out of the sides of the cliffs

This area of the town is popular for the mystical fairy chimneys also known as the weird mushroom shaped rock formations

In the devrent valley there were supposedly rock formations resembling different animals. This was the only one I could find, a rock camel. 

My last stop on the tour was the goreme open air museum. This is the most popular museum in the area.

I made it back to the hotel by 530 pm in the evening. I had skipped out on lunch and breakfast so I was really hungry by that time. I made it my next task to find dinner and my trip would not have been complete without the famous Testi Kebap:

Its customary for the waiter to break open the clay jar in front of you with a short saber

After dinner we explored one of the main cliffs of the town in which you can see many beautiful panoramas. This was the view of the city at night.

Just taking some silly pictures in a rug shop with a traditional kapadokyan headdress on.

Day 2:

On day 2 we woke up at 4am to catch the launching of many hot air balloons. Kapadokya is famous for its balloon tours but instead of coughing up 200 USD we just went to where we watched the sunset to watch the balloons and sunrise

panoramic view. It was amazing seeing how precise the balloon pilots were in their flights. It's crazy how close to the rocks the balloons are floating.

Definitely worth waiting for 2 hours after 4am for the view. Had a great nap back at the hotel afterwards.

We woke up promptly at 830 am to depart for our guided green tour. I am glad I took the guided tour because the destinations of this trip were very far from where we were. It would have been very hard to navigate on my own.

Cool tree decorated with eyes of nazar. These are very popular in middle eastern and western asian countries. The folklore behind it is that they soak up all negative energy aimed towards you or your home.

This was a yemekhane, or cafeteria in one of the underground cities

Then we went for a hike in one of the famous valleys. We walked for about 3km down stream to where we would have lunch.

The restaurant at the end of our hike where we had lunch had this shelters where you could literally eat on top of the water

Then with no surprise we visited another place with more cave dwellings. This place was pretty nice because there were less tourists and more secluded.

After our tour we went to "Turkish Night" organized by one of the restaurants in Avanos. It consisted of traditional Turkish food and many shows, including a whirling dervish ceremony.

Turkish Night was the last activity of our Kapadokya Trip. We woke up the next morning at 8am to catch our 10hr bus ride back to Istanbul. This was by far my favorite trip in Turkish. It was an excellent mix of nature hikes, history, and Turkish culture. I could have definitely spent another 2-3 days further exploring the area.

When I was in Kapadokya my sister had also arrived to Istanbul. She is spending six weeks teaching English and working in a hospital. I was able to meet up with her a couple of times after I returned during the very little free time I had between work and my travel. Nonetheless, it was fun spending time with her and showing her around Turkey (as if I knew everything about Istanbul).

PS I have one more experience from Turkey (Antalya) to share with you before I begin to share my South Korean experiences so please bear with me. I'll hopefully make the antalya post a bit shorter than this one :)