VLOG #2 - My new neighborhood

Heeya!

I studied so intensively the whole weekend I woke up today and realized I have no more studying to do. So I took a long walk around my neighborhood and then spent the rest of the day in a cafe working on this small vlog~ Hope you guys enjoy it, I had fun making it !

xx,
Julia

University life in Korea

Hey guys !

This is something I'm really eager to share with you guys because I get tons of questions regarding my studies, my major, my university and so on. As you know I attended the Hanyang language institute last year and I wrote a Korea one-o'-one post about it here. But rather than making this an informative Korea101 - type of a post I decided to just concentrate on honestly telling my opinion and how everything has went this year this far and how I feel about my studies in general, et cetera ! 

School started on the second of March and before that there was an orientation for us international students. We were not informed about any other orientations or events besides this one, so obviously I went there. It was this one day long event where we got information about university life and then got divided into smaller groups and taken to the computer class to choose what courses we want to take and learned how to do the course registration, which was going to happen the next week. 

Course registration here in Korea is a real battlefield where the weaker get eliminated real quickly and only the strongest and fastest clickers survive alive from the battle and get the courses they want. When the course registration starts probably more than hundred people will click the same button at the same time with you to get to a course with a limitation of max 30 people or so. I got lucky and got all my courses but I'm sure this will not happen every semester so I am already like mentally preparing myself for that.  

One thing that I've learned is that you definitely need to stay active instead of waiting the university to give you information because they don't. Few days after school had started I learned that all the MeCom (Media communication) students had already had few meetups and their own orientation. They had met the sunbaes (older students) and had a party together, et cetera. Basically everyone knew each other and I was the foreign student who knew nothing about anything and got left out. 

When I heard this I honestly got very stressed and stalked the whole facebook around to find some people studying in my major or even like groups meant for us media students. Finally I found one, got accepted in it and wrote a panic post asking if there's any get togethers for media students and who should I contact regarding these matters. Because well, as a international student they had completely left me out of the whole thing and no one was telling me absolutely anything. This is something that I've heard happen several times to like, well, everyone who studies here in Korea. I don't know why but schools seem to expect that us international students do not want to like actively participate in university life. 

Anyway what I want to say is that if you are coming here for uni or are here and have noticed this happening to you too then STAY. ACTIVE. Use your social media skills to find a link to get into the circles or go to your international affairs - office and ask, ask ask. Someone will definitely help you and give you some kind of a contact information to get in touch with other students from your own major.

When you do get into the circles school life will get a lot easier and it will be just amazing. It's all about hanging out together all. The. Time. We have a kakao group chat for all media communication students & own chat for the class of 16. In addition we have a group chat for only girls, and then another 2 group chats for like our own class which has about 14 students in total. So it is very social and all the information pretty much just moves through those group chats, school offices don't really inform us about anything. 

University life here is really active and studying comes like after pretty much everything else. In addition to like regular after school activity - clubs (they literally have everything from dancing to debating and skiing) our own school, Department of social studies that have students in 4 majors in total, has own clubs for only our students. Hip hop club, dance club and a band club. Most of the students in those clubs are from Media communication though. It seems to be a widely know inside joke that us Media communication students are the loudest, wildest & most active students among the social studies department. As if that's not enough we also have clubs only meant for Media communication students. There's about 5 of them and they all are very related to our own studies. I recently joined a club where we write, film and edit music videos, trailers, movies, short-movies, news, skits, et cetera. So those are like for us to get some experience and get better at what all of us are probably going to end up doing after graduation. Here is an example of the music video & trailer they did last year. Go check them out, they're pretty great ! Below's our club's group picture. 

Besides these endless club activity options Korean students seem to love after school drinking, too. Some of us go drinking literally every night, and then the next morning try to rush to the first classes of the day. When you combine 8 hour school days, after school club activities and ending the night with friends in a restaurant & maybe a round of noraebang it's pretty understandable why I haven't been blogging a lot lately, right? 

What comes to university lectures here it seems pretty much like Finland's high school life. Professors are not strict (most of the time) so you are free to use your phone or sleep or what not but you need to stay quiet (obviously) and you only get 4 absences from one course before they kick you out. Which makes sense, because people fight to get into those lectures so why not show up to the class then. 

Usually the professors have Power point presentations and we follow the lecture and study through those. Books are not very often used. There's a book almost for every class I think, but most of the time the professors tell you it's up to you if you want to get the book or not. We have this HY-IN - portal site where we can do online assignments, listen to online lectures, submit our assignments and papers and also where some of the teachers upload the PPT file we went through during the class, so you can like study after the class too. I've really liked this online system this far. It works well and it's easy to use. There are also some courses that are completely online courses so those are done through hy-in as well. 

We have a lot of group projects. A lot of them. Koreans seem to love group projects. We also have a lot of assignments. Most of the studying takes place outside university lectures so don't be fooled; your timetable might look easy but you will probably still have to work your ass off. Case in point the picture on the left. This is how my timetable looks this semester. Besides these classes I have one online class and in total I get about 15 credits. Even though I don't have much classes I am still completely packed with quizzes, essays, team projects, speeches and online assignments. So do not underestimate the work load you will get! Especially on your first semester my advice would be to get a bit less courses so that you have sort of time to adjust into everything. 

And last but not least I want to talk a bit for something called Membership training that is basically the reason why people go to university here in Korea. Membership training aka MT (엠티) is a trip Korean university students take several times a year. Clubs have their own MT's, major students have their own MT's, et cetera. It's basically an overnight trip we take with friends. Rent a pension, buy 60 bottles of soju and a crapload of food. MT's are usually made of lots of group games, drinking games, karaoke, dancing, BBQ & cooking together, staying up until 7am, making fun of people who passed out before you, sleeping on the floor, taking love shots or dancing in front of everyone as a punishment, and then a very long bus ride back home the next day while completely hungover. MTs are amazing.

So yeah that's pretty much everything I have in my mind for now. University life in Korea has been nothing but great this far and I am really happy I made the choice to come here. If you read all the way down here and you're still with me then wow hello there that must've been hard congratulations and thank you! If you have any questions leave me a comment or message me on tumblr if you're shy. Love you guys ! 

xx,
Julia

Sunsets in my neighborhood are pretty

Here's few pictures I snapped on my way home to prove my point and Hello guys !! Just a quick update ~

I hope you all have been doing great and enjoying the spring that's been around for a while already. For me this is already a summer weather as a girl from the cold north, so personally it's getting too nice and pretty and warm way too quickly and I'd love to enjoy these 20 Celsius weathers a bit more before it gets too hot to even function.

The exam week is right around the corner and that means I have several days off coming up which is great but I also have about 3 essays and one speech to write and too little time which is not too great. Tomorrow I need to write one of them and after I get that out of the way I need to do some frantic summer clothes - shopping here in Hongdae. I'm in a desperate need of like basic t-shirts and what not. Midterms kind of also mark as the actual start of our our first graders' first year because until now it's been all fun and games and crazy drinking. Now it's gonna be crazy studying and crazy drinking. For about a month at least, and then starts the Spring festival preparations! 

Anyway. I have a bunch of studying to do for tonight so I'm gonna get to that so I can sleep before 3am. I have a post coming up tomorrow about university life here in Korea so stay tuned~ 

this was so pointless

xx,
Julia

4 x spring liquid lipsticks

Hey guys ! 

It's officially spring here in Korea now ! The cherry blossom time is right around the corner and we are already busy making plans with school friends to go have picnics in the park and ride bicycles along Han river. Spring is my favorite season in Korea because it's not too hot and it's so incredibly pretty.

Anyway! With spring comes spring colors. I updated my liquid lipstick / liptint collection by few new colors from Innisfree. I've had the same kind of lipstick from them before too and I liked it a lot so I decided to go for the same brand and collection. 

[From L. to R.] Innisfree Real fluid rouge NO. 6 햇살 사과 한입, NO. 4사과나무 옆  오렌지, NO. 5 볼 빨간아기사과, NO. 3발그레 꽃송이

I was stupid and swatched the colors in wrong order, so the number order for this picture is from L. to R. 6, 5, 4, 3 !

[From L. to R.] Top: NO 6 & 5 Bottom: NO 4 & 3

I hardly ever go full coverage with these lipsticks but for the sake of proper color payoff I did the whole lip - look. Usually I use these as a tint on my inner lips with a lot of blending and lip balm and go for the typical Korean gradient lip (click) but the lipsticks work really either way ! I am especially loving the orange one, which looks just adorable and very subtle when used just to give that small tint of color to your lips. You can see what I meant by checking that picture I linked in the previous sentence, picture no. 4. Orange is a really popular lip color here in Korea and I've honestly felt kind of weird about it until I went and gave it a try. 

Anyway yes I've been loving these new lipsticks for the past week and I love how they go with spring makeup! I've been doing lots of like peachy / orange-ish looks lately. I don't know what's with me and orange suddenly, hahah! But you gotta try new things, right?  Just proved myself wrong with the whole Orange lip situation. They have really nice light pink colors in this collection too so next time I go lipstick shopping I will probably check those out too. 

On completely other news I just got a message from my classmate informing me we are keeping a pajama party at my place and asking what day suits me the best, hahah! I also joined a club & have literally every other day of this week full of plans with my friends except for today, but I will get back to that in the next post. 

I hope you all are enjoying this new week and have a great day / night ! <3 

ps. Holding a Korean beauty giveaway on tumblr when I reach my next thousand, stay tuned !

xx,
Julia

Life update + apartment sneak peek + university life

Hello beautiful people ! 

It's been a while, hasn't it? I know a lot of you follow me on another social medias that I have been updating somewhat regularly but there's also some of you who only follow me through blogger so I thought I'd make some time for a proper blog post. It's 11:50pm and I have school tomorrow morning so as you can see I am literally just running out of hours nowadays and that's why I haven't been able to write here. 

It's been about 3 and a half weeks since I came to Korea and my first weeks were kind of a blur with me meeting and catching up with friends, trying to find Korean language somehow again (lol) and looking for an apartment and then handling the whole moving houses - process along with signing papers and you know boring adult stuff like that. And then once that was over I had about a week to settle down and get ready for university that started like 4 days ago. It's been hell of a month but everything is slowly settling down again and now that I have an apartment and steady weekly schedule with classes and whatnot I feel like I can breathe again and I am, indeed, back home. 

On the 22th of February I moved from Idae to Hongdae. I live in an officitel style loft apartment, which means I have a small upstairs and a window almost the size of a wall. Before I came to Korea I used to day dream about an apartment like this and now few years later I am living in one. Which feels pretty great. It's about 8 minutes from Hongdae station and in a very quiet, pretty and clean neighborhood with lots of like kindergartens, parks and coffee shops. For the first time I actually can see people walking their dogs on the streets. I am absolutely in love with my new neighborhood and I feel like I'm gonna be spending more than just a year in this apartment. I have published pictures in snapchat and whatnot but here's a small sneak peek of how it looks at the moment.

As you can see I still have stuff under the stairs waiting to find a right place and the downstairs has only a desk at the moment, that will move upstairs to serve as a drawer & a TV stand later on when I get a new table, mat and a sofa downstairs to make it look like a hanging out - area instead of a...well, floor. I will update you guys later on on this issue when it actually starts to look like an apartment and do like a proper apartment post. I will also do a neighborhood video / photo post in couple of weeks when the spring kicks in and it will be nicer to take pictures. 

What comes to university life, I'm really super excited. Today I got added into the kakaotalk group of this year's media communication freshmen and we already have like few events coming up together and everyone seemed so welcoming and cute, I can't wait to get to know all my fellow media students. The first weeks are pretty much just chilling having fun and drinking with your school friends especially because we are freshmen now, but it will probably change a lot in few weeks when the exams and essays start so let me get back at you with that later on too, my opinion might change a lot when the stress kicks in. Tomorrow I have a "understanding of philosophy" lecture for like 2 hours all in Korean so I might just come home crying. 

Besides the philosophy course I am also taking "basics of mass media", "human leadership", "The language of cinema & movies", "speaking & writing" & one extra course on like university life and studying in a university. My timetable looks pretty chill with only max 2 classes a day and a Friday completely free, which I did on purpose so that I have time to get used to studying in Korean and have time to finish all my assignments et cetera.

Otherwise everything is going well here! I will keep updating you guys through snapchat (juliaaaey), twitter (sidebar) and instagram (also on sidebar).  I hope you all have a great week coming up ! 

xx,
Julia