South Korea has been really good to me so far. But nobody and nowhere is perfect so there has to be a few things that I wish could change about here!<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The weather.<\/strong> There are basically only 2 seasons in Seoul: winter and summer. It’s also very dry and windy here. I mean, a breeze is good, but not when it hits you full force and almost knocks you off your feet… and it doesn’t help that I’m only 156cm tall either.<\/p>\n \n The sewers.<\/strong> As I mentioned before, South Korea’s sewage system is not that great – you can’t flush toilet paper down the toilet. There are also a lot of open sewers around the street and once you walk past\/over them.. you will smell it for sure. The worst part is that for whatever reason, our bathroom in our room will occasionally smell like sewer. Especially when it rains!<\/p>\n \n The assumptions<\/strong>. Yeah, I get that I’m not Korean and I speak English when I’m out. But is it really necessary to immediately assume that I’m Chinese when I’m walking around? I mean\u00a0yeah\u00a0<\/em>I\u00a0am\u00a0<\/strong>Chinese but doesn’t mean you have to immediately speak Mandarin to me right away. My first language is English, my second is Cantonese, and my third is Mandarin! And yeah, I get that a lot of Chinese tourists come to\u00a0Seoul to shop and they speak the language so that they can get their promotions across… but it still kind of sucks.<\/p>\n \n Groceries are expensive.<\/strong> Need I say anything more? I want fruit but the fruit is expensive. Not because I’m a university student on a budget, but because the prices are so much higher than the ones I’m used to back at home. So I have to selectively buy what’s on sale. And I almost\u00a0never\u00a0<\/em>buy fruits in supermarkets – only veggies, protein, and seasoning. Fruits come from street vendors since I actually know how to choose them!<\/p>\n \n Lack of ‘things to do’\u00a0<\/strong>. Because I don’t speak the language well, I don’t know about the really fun things to do here. I get that you can shop, go to tourist destinations, eat, and shop some more, but I wish it was like back at home where there would be random (free) events that I could go to. Like Hats Off Day, in Burnaby.<\/p>\n \n Other than that Seoul is great and I really like it here. It might not seem like it after I just listed the things that I don’t like about it, but trust me, I really do like living here and it’s a really great experience seeing culture on the other side of the world!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" South Korea has been really good to me so far. But nobody and nowhere is perfect so there has to be a few things that I wish could change about here!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":32883,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[60,334488,78115,1158995],"class_list":["post-278","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blog","tag-living","tag-place","tag-seoul"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/32883"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":285,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278\/revisions\/285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kwongkat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}