Hey everyone! After frequent stalking of my friend Danielle's European vacation blog and a lot of prompting from my dad, I've decided to make a blog documenting my trip to Korea as part of Team USA at the 2015 World University Games.
We got in last night after about 30 hours of travel that seemed to last 30 years. In the interest of avoiding a massive paragraph, here is a timeline of the past 48 hours:
4:30 AM on 6/28/15: Wake up. Take quick shower. Realize it's the last shower I'm going to take until I reach Korea. Get back into shower and scrub frantically in a futile attempt to avoid smelling later on (this failed).
5:00 AM: Parental units drop me off at airport (yes, I am a huge princess and my parents drove down from Richmond to put me on the plane. Shout out to Kathy and Jerry Nunn for being MVPs and making sure I didn't forget half my stuff or get on a plane to Siberia by accident).
6:50 AM- 12:30 PM (or 9:30 West Coast Time): First plane trip to San Fransisco. I put on compression socks and force myself to walk up and down the aisle every 30 minutes. I get a lot of weird looks. I also force myself to stay awake because I want to be able to sleep on the 12 hour flight to Seoul. This will prove to have been a gigantic mistake in about 7 hours when I can't sleep on the Seoul flight anyway.
10:00 AM in San Fransisco: Team USA has a quick meeting and we finally get to sit face to face with people we've either swam against or stalked on social media for years. I recognize almost nobody because I am clueless.
11:00 AM: Flight leaves for Seoul. This is by far the largest plane I've ever been on. Because I am clueless, I didn't know that planes with two levels existed outside of rap videos and movies about rich people.
NOTE: Things begin to get tricky with time at this point, so I'm going to document the time as I saw it on the clock. Honestly the next 18 hours melded together like a box of crayons in North Carolina in July, so any further descriptions are at best 85% accurate.
12:30 PM: We are served a gourmet airline lunch of chicken fried noodles. On a scale of 1-10 (1 being Little Caesars Pizza and 10 being a blizzard from Dairy Queen) I give the noodles a 6 and the chicken a 1. Good thing I ate most of my snacks out of boredom on my first flight.
2:00 PM: I am tired and attempt to sleep. Guess what? I can't sleep. I hate myself.
4:00 PM: I realize my computer has movies on it and start watching Up, completely blowing away any chance I have of being taken seriously by anyone. I don't care because Pixar movies are good for my soul.
around 6:00 PM: "I am so hungry" I think to myself as I devour the last of my granola bars.
9:00 PM: I try to put my shoes on and realize my feet are roughly the size and shape of polish sausages (more on this later).
I've stopped keeping time at this point. We are served a surprisingly delicious breakfast of eggs and potatoes. It's strange to eat breakfast at what feels like the middle of the night, but at this point I would have been willing to ingest the gum on the bottom of my shoes.
sometime between 2 and 3 PM: ARRIVE IN KOREA! We get off the plane and after waiting in line to get our passports stamped, we collect our bags and assemble to get on a bus ride to the village. There are a bunch of adorable little kids waiting for us when we get in. Said adorable children are accompanied by volunteers who hand us snacks. Here is a list and description of each of the snacks:
- Trail Mix: standard, run of the mill fruit and nut mix. I'm impressed and relieved by the normalcy of this trail mix and its relatively western appearance.
- Sandwich: Made of turkey, ham, something called ham salad, and what looks like pickle relish. I throw this away without even tasting it. I'd be reluctant to try anything called "ham salad" on a normal day, let alone after almost 18 hours of travel.
- Crispy Banana Chips: These are the best thing I've ever tasted. I want to throw them up and eat them again. I devour the bag without a second thought.
- Drinkable Yogurt: I am scared of this, but drink it before I can think twice. It's cherry flavored, and the more I drink it the better it tastes. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I ever drink it again? No.
4:20 PM: We get on buses, excited to leave.
5:00 PM: The buses leave. We are slightly less excited after sitting for more than 30 minutes.
5:15 PM: Attempt to drink in the sights. Korea is foggy and dark and I am so tired.
7:00 PM: Wake up at a random gas station in Korea. Didn't even realize I fell asleep. Get off the bus and go to the bathroom with everyone else. Takeaways: Korean gas stations have interesting food for sale but surprisingly clean bathrooms. We get back on the buses. We are only halfway through the ride.
9:00 PM: Wake up again on the bus. We're not in the village, but we are in an area full of brightly lit and flashing signs. It kind of looks like a video game. I smell so bad at this point I imagine squiggly green lines radiating off my skin.
9:15 PM: FINALLY arrive outside of village. We get our stuff to go through security. At the security checkpoint, a very enthusiastic Korean volunteer recites for me all the states he knows of (which includes, but is not limited to, Texas, Nevada and Illinois) and asks me where I'm from. Virginia rings no bells for him and I don't want to throw him for any more of a loop by saying North Carolina. I just smile and not a lot and I'd like to think we parted as friends.
9:30 PM: We drop our stuff off in front of the building and are taken to the dining hall. I'm a little apprehensive about the food, but it turns out to be AWESOME! The most "western" food I see is pizza, tater tots, chicken fingers and spaghetti. The tots are great, probably the highlight of my meal. I wonder vaguely if I'm going to live on tater tots for the next week and a half and decide that there are worse fates.
10:30??? PM: Get back to the building we dropped our stuff at and go to our rooms on the ninth floor. The rooms are suite style, with anywhere from five to seven people in each room. Half of the suite is covered in plastic because apparently these are getting turned into apartments and they don't want us to mess them up. The mattresses are hard and after feeling the sheets which one of my roommates aptly described as feeling like a "tarp", I'm glad I brought my own.
11:00 PM: I fall into my bed and sleep like a dead body.
After reading that do you feel overwhelmed and exhausted and sick and confused and lucky to be alive? Good, because that's how I felt after experiencing it.
This morning after eating an excellent breakfast at the dining hall (which included omelets made with chopsticks) we went to the pool to swim. To get to the pool, we get on buses from the village that run every 15 minutes. There is a special "swimming" bus. This information will become relevant later on. To put this in the most articulate and mature terms I can, THIS POOL IS FREAKING AMAZING!!! See the pictures below. I didn't feel nearly as bad as I thought I would in the water. It was actually really cool to see how different teams trained/warmed up. The Japanese swimmers had pull buoys that doubled as kickboards... I'll try to get a picture of this later. I also saw someone with a fly that was as weird or weirder than mine, so that was a confidence booster.
After the swim, I chatted and changed and then wandered onto the bus that was heading back to the village at 11:10. Absorbed as I was in my phone, I didn't realize that absolutely nobody I knew was on the bus. I ended up sitting in front of the South Africans who weren't speaking English and spent the ride alone praying that I was on the right bus and would end up back in the village. Moral of the story: I should pay less attention to my phone and more attention to the world.
When we got back, we ate lunch and then picked up the rest of the merchandise that BTI provided us with for the event. This stuff is awesome!! (and no I'm not just saying this because I'm afraid of retaliation if I give it a bad review) I have no idea how I'm going to fit everything back into my suitcase when we leave, but I'm going to avoid thinking about that for now.
And now, for those of you who didn't read a single word I just wrote, here are some pictures from the last 48 hours:
We got in last night after about 30 hours of travel that seemed to last 30 years. In the interest of avoiding a massive paragraph, here is a timeline of the past 48 hours:
4:30 AM on 6/28/15: Wake up. Take quick shower. Realize it's the last shower I'm going to take until I reach Korea. Get back into shower and scrub frantically in a futile attempt to avoid smelling later on (this failed).
5:00 AM: Parental units drop me off at airport (yes, I am a huge princess and my parents drove down from Richmond to put me on the plane. Shout out to Kathy and Jerry Nunn for being MVPs and making sure I didn't forget half my stuff or get on a plane to Siberia by accident).
6:50 AM- 12:30 PM (or 9:30 West Coast Time): First plane trip to San Fransisco. I put on compression socks and force myself to walk up and down the aisle every 30 minutes. I get a lot of weird looks. I also force myself to stay awake because I want to be able to sleep on the 12 hour flight to Seoul. This will prove to have been a gigantic mistake in about 7 hours when I can't sleep on the Seoul flight anyway.
10:00 AM in San Fransisco: Team USA has a quick meeting and we finally get to sit face to face with people we've either swam against or stalked on social media for years. I recognize almost nobody because I am clueless.
11:00 AM: Flight leaves for Seoul. This is by far the largest plane I've ever been on. Because I am clueless, I didn't know that planes with two levels existed outside of rap videos and movies about rich people.
NOTE: Things begin to get tricky with time at this point, so I'm going to document the time as I saw it on the clock. Honestly the next 18 hours melded together like a box of crayons in North Carolina in July, so any further descriptions are at best 85% accurate.
12:30 PM: We are served a gourmet airline lunch of chicken fried noodles. On a scale of 1-10 (1 being Little Caesars Pizza and 10 being a blizzard from Dairy Queen) I give the noodles a 6 and the chicken a 1. Good thing I ate most of my snacks out of boredom on my first flight.
2:00 PM: I am tired and attempt to sleep. Guess what? I can't sleep. I hate myself.
4:00 PM: I realize my computer has movies on it and start watching Up, completely blowing away any chance I have of being taken seriously by anyone. I don't care because Pixar movies are good for my soul.
around 6:00 PM: "I am so hungry" I think to myself as I devour the last of my granola bars.
9:00 PM: I try to put my shoes on and realize my feet are roughly the size and shape of polish sausages (more on this later).
I've stopped keeping time at this point. We are served a surprisingly delicious breakfast of eggs and potatoes. It's strange to eat breakfast at what feels like the middle of the night, but at this point I would have been willing to ingest the gum on the bottom of my shoes.
sometime between 2 and 3 PM: ARRIVE IN KOREA! We get off the plane and after waiting in line to get our passports stamped, we collect our bags and assemble to get on a bus ride to the village. There are a bunch of adorable little kids waiting for us when we get in. Said adorable children are accompanied by volunteers who hand us snacks. Here is a list and description of each of the snacks:
- Trail Mix: standard, run of the mill fruit and nut mix. I'm impressed and relieved by the normalcy of this trail mix and its relatively western appearance.
- Sandwich: Made of turkey, ham, something called ham salad, and what looks like pickle relish. I throw this away without even tasting it. I'd be reluctant to try anything called "ham salad" on a normal day, let alone after almost 18 hours of travel.
- Crispy Banana Chips: These are the best thing I've ever tasted. I want to throw them up and eat them again. I devour the bag without a second thought.
- Drinkable Yogurt: I am scared of this, but drink it before I can think twice. It's cherry flavored, and the more I drink it the better it tastes. Did I enjoy it? Yes. Would I ever drink it again? No.
4:20 PM: We get on buses, excited to leave.
5:00 PM: The buses leave. We are slightly less excited after sitting for more than 30 minutes.
5:15 PM: Attempt to drink in the sights. Korea is foggy and dark and I am so tired.
7:00 PM: Wake up at a random gas station in Korea. Didn't even realize I fell asleep. Get off the bus and go to the bathroom with everyone else. Takeaways: Korean gas stations have interesting food for sale but surprisingly clean bathrooms. We get back on the buses. We are only halfway through the ride.
9:00 PM: Wake up again on the bus. We're not in the village, but we are in an area full of brightly lit and flashing signs. It kind of looks like a video game. I smell so bad at this point I imagine squiggly green lines radiating off my skin.
9:15 PM: FINALLY arrive outside of village. We get our stuff to go through security. At the security checkpoint, a very enthusiastic Korean volunteer recites for me all the states he knows of (which includes, but is not limited to, Texas, Nevada and Illinois) and asks me where I'm from. Virginia rings no bells for him and I don't want to throw him for any more of a loop by saying North Carolina. I just smile and not a lot and I'd like to think we parted as friends.
9:30 PM: We drop our stuff off in front of the building and are taken to the dining hall. I'm a little apprehensive about the food, but it turns out to be AWESOME! The most "western" food I see is pizza, tater tots, chicken fingers and spaghetti. The tots are great, probably the highlight of my meal. I wonder vaguely if I'm going to live on tater tots for the next week and a half and decide that there are worse fates.
10:30??? PM: Get back to the building we dropped our stuff at and go to our rooms on the ninth floor. The rooms are suite style, with anywhere from five to seven people in each room. Half of the suite is covered in plastic because apparently these are getting turned into apartments and they don't want us to mess them up. The mattresses are hard and after feeling the sheets which one of my roommates aptly described as feeling like a "tarp", I'm glad I brought my own.
11:00 PM: I fall into my bed and sleep like a dead body.
After reading that do you feel overwhelmed and exhausted and sick and confused and lucky to be alive? Good, because that's how I felt after experiencing it.
This morning after eating an excellent breakfast at the dining hall (which included omelets made with chopsticks) we went to the pool to swim. To get to the pool, we get on buses from the village that run every 15 minutes. There is a special "swimming" bus. This information will become relevant later on. To put this in the most articulate and mature terms I can, THIS POOL IS FREAKING AMAZING!!! See the pictures below. I didn't feel nearly as bad as I thought I would in the water. It was actually really cool to see how different teams trained/warmed up. The Japanese swimmers had pull buoys that doubled as kickboards... I'll try to get a picture of this later. I also saw someone with a fly that was as weird or weirder than mine, so that was a confidence booster.
After the swim, I chatted and changed and then wandered onto the bus that was heading back to the village at 11:10. Absorbed as I was in my phone, I didn't realize that absolutely nobody I knew was on the bus. I ended up sitting in front of the South Africans who weren't speaking English and spent the ride alone praying that I was on the right bus and would end up back in the village. Moral of the story: I should pay less attention to my phone and more attention to the world.
When we got back, we ate lunch and then picked up the rest of the merchandise that BTI provided us with for the event. This stuff is awesome!! (and no I'm not just saying this because I'm afraid of retaliation if I give it a bad review) I have no idea how I'm going to fit everything back into my suitcase when we leave, but I'm going to avoid thinking about that for now.
And now, for those of you who didn't read a single word I just wrote, here are some pictures from the last 48 hours: