Getting to Seoul

Visiting another country can be very nerve wracking and intimidating, especially if you haven’t traveled there before, or it's your first time traveling outside of the country. I guess you could say I had a very unique experience traveling across the world. It was my first time ever leaving the country, and no less to a place where most people did not speak English. On top of the lack of experience I had and the language barrier, it was right in the middle of the pandemic and I was going alone. The pandemic contributed to a widely different travel experience I had than others, and contributed to more concerns on top of the ones I already had.

To get into South Korea during the pandemic, there was a mandatory two week quarantine that all travelers had to go through. This was my first obstacle, since in the states I had never needed to quarantine like that. Being alone in a hotel room in a different country was quite the experience. I was given only Korean food, and I could only watch Korean shows on the TV. It was quite hard keeping myself entertained and I desperately tried to not sleep all day long. The two weeks were the shortest and longest two weeks I have had in my entire life, and I was insanely excited when the day to leave came.

Despite my enormous excitement, this day brought many new and scary experiences. The hotel we stayed at for quarantine would only allow us to take a bus into the city, and then from there take whatever transportation necessary to get to our final destination. Luckily I was with friends I had made on my way to Seoul and in quarantine, so this first part of the trip was much less turbulent than I was expecting. The scary part came when my friends and I realized we needed to be separated to get to our university due to the size of our luggage. I was then put in a taxi, with only the address of my school, my luggage, and my service-less phone.

At this moment I was actually freaking out. Throughout the majority of the drive, the taxi driver was having trouble putting the address into his GPS, and this contributed to my imagination going wild. I was then threatened with thoughts of getting lost with nobody to call in a foreign city, and was borderline about to break down in the back of this taxi. I was staring at the GPS as if I knew where we were going and was prepared for anything to happen. I was absolutely terrified until I looked up and saw a large street sign announcing our arrival to Yonsei University. The nerves and adrenaline absolutely disappeared from my body, and I was immediately excited to get out and explore the city I was in, with no care for what had just happened. My first day ended up being one of the funniest experiences I had while in Seoul, and is a pleasant memory to look back on.

My turbulent first experience with traveling across the world comes in no comparison to the absolute wonder I had stepping out into the city for the first time. Before I had even left the country I was so worried about what would happen to me, and yet all of those worries paled in comparison to the insanely cool experience I had in South Korea. This is a reminder that no matter how scary traveling may seem, in the end it is ten times worth it to go through that scarieness to experience things you've never had before.