First Few Days in Seoul

So here I am, in Seoul and the only person I've really met is my Russian roommate, Andre, and I have 4 days to get settled in. Fortunately, I didn't suffer from jet lag. I was up for over 24 hours but went to bed at 7pm, got a full night's sleep. I woke up the following day refreshed and didn't feel the effects of the time difference. I spent the first few days wandering around campus and the area surrounding the university.

Kookmin has a beautiful campus. It is on the edge of Seoul and backs onto the mountains and is covered in plants and trees giving it a very comfortable feel. The buildings are also very modern which gives the whole campus a very different feel then McGill with its old buildings and open fields.

Kookmin University is located in Seoungbuk-gu, a district in the northern part of Seoul. The area surrounding the university is primarily residential. The main streets are large with modern buildings but step off the main road and you find yourself in a very stereotypical asian atmosphere: little winding streets with small, old oriental buildings. I wandered into a little market one day and enjoyed walking around and seeing all of the fresh produce and fish. Well, not so much the fish, the smells were a little nauseating at times, but I was still fascinated at the varieties of fish that I had never seen before. The market also provided my first big culture shock as I tried to buy a little something to eat from an older lady and I realized that the language barrier here is much greater then elsewhere.

When in Germany or the Czech Republic, the languages were foreign but the sounds were similar which made communicating difficult but possible. Here that difficulty is accentuated by the large gap between Engilsh and Hangul (Korean language), the sounds are so different that I forget words and words that I learned a minute ago. Names are a big problem for me, I will forget someone's name shortly after they tell it to me despite my efforts to commit it to memory, but if they give me a western name I'll remember it when I see them days later.

Seoul is a very impressive city. The city proper is home to over 10 million people and over 23 million live in the metropolitan area. This is a major city. The first thing that struck me about Seoul, while driving in from the airport and while walking around, is the massive quantity of giant apartment complexes. Ottawa doesn't have anything that compares. In Montreal, imagine La Cité, but they're everywhere. My description of Seoul is to take La Cité and the McGill Ghetto and multiply it by a couple thousand, and then place the city in the Laurentians. The picture here doesn't really do the city justice, but it'll give you an idea.