Yonsei Global and Mentors Club – both are clubs designed to help foreigners integrate better into Yonsei’s school life, but they’re rival clubs that try to get get more students in each club. I participated in activities that were held by both groups so I thought it would be interesting to compare them a bit.

For Yonsei Global activities, I participated in their second Seoul Tour, their K-Pop Dancing Class, as well as their Amorepacific company tour (CT). I also tagged along with the One-Shot (OS) program once even though I didn’t sign up for it, and I also went to participate in their activities for Spain Day.

The second Seoul Tour actually happened a few days after I arrived in Seoul. They took us to the Blue House museum (I thought we would actually go to the Blue House.. unfortunately we didn’t; we did get to take pictures of the building though), newspaper museum, a newspaper office, and to end it off we got to eat dinner at a buffet. The only reason why I chose the second Seoul tour was because of the buffet 😛 But I’m glad we went on this one because we did meet some new friends that we’ve been pretty close with these past few months! The Seoul tour cost 20 000KRW, if I remember correctly.

 The K-Pop Dance Class happened 3 times, and it was 30 000KRW for 3 classes – BUT, if you went to all 3 classes you’d be able to get 10 000KRW back. Every session we would meet up at the gate and walk to the studio together. We ended up learning parts to Red Velvet’s Dumb Dumb, Big Bang’s Bang Bang Bang, and EXO’s Call Me Baby. The instructor really looked like AOMG’s Jay Park, but a lot skinnier! After every class there would be an option of going out for dinner together (but obviously you’d have to pay for your own dinner).

I originally signed up for 2 CTs, the Amorepacific one and the Nongshim one. Unfortunately, the Nongshim one didn’t actually happen and they changed it to an MBC tour so Claudia and I demanded for (and got) a refund.

The Amorepacific CT was nothing like I thought it would be – it was more a tour of the makeup company’s museum and an explanation of their history. But it was nice because the Yonsei Global people gave us snacks on the bus (a fairly large amount of snacks…), and we each got a free lipstick and picture from the tour! The lipstick smells like lychee and its really quite nice.

I actually tagged along with the OS program that Vivian, Estevan, and Claudia signed up for since Stef wasn’t home that day and I didn’t want to be alone. They took us to Gwangjang Market and I didn’t really understand where the picture taking happened, but at least I got to eat yummy food and I got to experience a Korean market!

Yonsei Global also had this little event called Spain Day where they tried to get people to be more familiar to Spain. It wasn’t the most well planned, but at least I got a free churro out of it (:

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For Mentor’s Club, you have to sign up and then you get separated into cells of around 20 people, and then each cell has a few individual groups. My individual group wasn’t very active and I haven’t even actually met the people in my group, but I really think my cell is quite nice. The two times I went out with them our cell leader Junha was really interactive and tried to talk to us a lot.

The first time we went out to Gyeongbok Palace and then to drink makgeolli, and the second time we just had a quick lunch and snack.

A mentor in my cell recently also told us that she got tickets for a Korean broadcast show (which I will blog about later) as well so I thought it was really nice that she took us exchange students instead of just offering it to her friends! And, at Akaraka, Junha was really nice and came to dance around with u as well.

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I guess overall Yonsei Global and Mentors Club both weren’t as active as I thought they would be. I definitely made more friends through Mentors Club since there were more individual interactions, but I think for experiences they both gave me a fairly good and equal amount of Korean culture experience. I guess it’s really obvious that clubs are really just what you make of them yourself, and I can definitely say that I’ve been having a better experience with clubs in Korea than some of my other friends have been. No regrets in taking part in these activities at all!