Hello all!

It’s been a while since I’ve written here, but I’ve been wanting to bring this blog back to life this summer. To start off, I’ve graduated! After two years at Indiana University, I’ve completed my Masters Degree in East Asian Studies with a focus on Korean. Writing the final essay/thesis was extremely stressful, but I did very much enjoy researching the topic which made life easier.

I also have completed my summer graduation trip! Doing a tour around various countries in Asia has been something I’ve been wanting to do for years, and this summer I had the opportunity to make it a reality before returning to Korea to study for the summer. Right now, I’m in Gwangju for CLS – my second time receiving the scholarship! – so this post is going to be focused on recapping my graduation trip before CLS starts properly, then I’m going to try to stick to weekly-ish posts about my CLS experience (crossing fingers for me to stay motivated!). That being said, I do want to get the entire trip knocked out in this, so prepare for a VERY long post.

Singapore

My first stop on the trip was Singapore, somewhere that’s been on my list for a long time as I have a friend that lives there! After the 16 hour flight to get there, I land, connect to wifi, check my phone… and my friend has just tested positive for Covid and is unable to meet while I’m there.

It was a rough start to the trip, but I made do – thankfully a very nice lady I’d sat next to on the plane gave me her number and offered to help if I ever needed it, which was very sweet. I’d landed at around 6 AM, and my hotel didn’t offer check-in until 3pm, so I dropped my stuff off to be stored in the lobby of the hotel and made my way out to explore the city a bit before I could return, head to my room, and crash.

I first went to the Merlion Park, where a statue of the city’s mascot (literally a mermaid lion) could be seen, along with a great view of the Marina Bay Sands (AKA the famous three-building hotel with a massive ship on top) and other well-known Singapore sights. The area was crowded with tourists despite the early hour, so after snapping a few pictures I headed to my next destination – the Singapore National Gallery, followed by the Singapore National Museum. I absolutely love museums and galleries and both were excellent (particularly as a way to learn more about Singapore’s history) but by the time I finished walking through those I was dying to get back to the hotel and into bed, lol. As soon as I was able to, I went straight back to the hotel and passed out for a few hours before getting back up, grabbing a quick dinner, planning out the next day and passing out yet again.

Day 2 in Singapore, there was a performance I wanted to see in the Gardens by the Bay, so I decided to head over there and explore the entire area. The Gardens themselves are huge, and this is where the famous Supertrees are. Unfortunately, not long after I arrived it started raining – while this wasn’t too bad at first because it meant there were hardly any people in the gardens, it eventually started raining so hard that I no longer wanted to walk around in my soaked shoes, so I headed towards the two indoor sections of the gardens, AKA the Flower Dome and Cloud Forest. Cloud Forest in particular was super cool – the entire indoor garden is meant to mimic the environment of a… well… cloud forest, aka a biome that is typically tropical, under almost constant cloud cover, and home to a huge amount of biodiversity. The garden was gorgeous and included a ton of different plants and information about them, along with different levels you could walk through. Overall, one of my favorite parts of the garden.

After that, I made my way over to the second indoor garden, the Flower Dome. This was where the performance I wanted to see was, and the garden included a lot of different garden zones meant to represent different parts of the world. The performance I wanted to see was Japanese flower arrangement, which involved the artist putting together several arrangements for us to see. I was shocked by how quickly she worked, and it was really cool to see the pieces come together.

It was still raining a bit after the show, but I decided to head to Chinatown for a bit regardless to grab some food for dinner. The MRT station I got off at put me right next to the Buddha’s Tooth Temple, so I went and poked around there for a little bit before heading off to find food. The temple required you to wear a cloth wrap if you’re wearing shorts, which I was that day – thankfully they provided some for people to wear in the temple if they weren’t wearing long pants or skirts already.

For dinner, I ended up just grabbing some noodles and dumplings at a nearby restaurant before heading back to the hotel for a bit, because I was feeling pretty wiped from both jetlag and the amount of walking I’d done that day. After resting for a little while, I headed back out to the Gardens by the Bay to catch the Garden Rhapsody, a nightly light show held in the Supertree Grove. That night’s show was inspired by Inside Out 2 since it was coming out soon when I was there.

Walking around the area at night was gorgeous, especially seeing the Supertrees and the Marina Bay Sands all lit up. Unfortunately by that time the tickets to the observatory on the ship on top of the hotel were sold out, but it was still very cool to see from the ground!

Day 3 in Singapore started with a trip to the botanical gardens, which were gorgeous and also MASSIVE. I spent a few hours walking around there, and got to see some fun critters including some monkeys, a lizard, and a lot of turtles.

The Botanical Gardens also included a massive orchid garden, which was super cool to walk around. I ended up staying at the gardens for most of the morning and a bit of the afternoon before heading out to see Little India and poke around there for a little while. Unfortunately, by the time I got there it had started raining pretty hard, but I was able to look around in the Indian Heritage Centre, which included a lot of information about the history of Indian people living in Singapore. It was a very cool place to look around in, and afterwards I looked around the area for a little longer before heading back to the hotel. That evening, I also dropped some gifts off for the friend I came to Singapore to visit – while we weren’t really able to hang out properly, we did say hi to each other masked through her condo gate as I handed off the goods LOL.

For my last day in Singapore, I’d booked my flight out for 1am to go overnight to Taiwan, so after checking out and storing my luggage at the hotel I had an entire day to spend looking around. I promised myself that I’d take it easy for the sake of my poor feet, but it ended up being the day I walked around and visited the most tourist spots so goal absolutely failed, whoops.

I started off the day on Sentosa Island to see the aquarium! I absolutely love all aquariums, museums, zoos, etc. so visiting the aquarium here had been pretty high on my list. Sentosa is also very well known as a tourist location, with a Universal Studios, cable car, aquarium, luge track, and a number of other attractions available. I just went to the aquarium, but it was kind of neat to just walk by the Universal globe even if I didn’t go in!

The weather was pretty nice at that point, so I decided to go back to Chinatown and enjoy it in the sun rather than the rain like I did that time. The hawker center was much less busy around lunchtime, so I got some food there and some delicious tangyuan soup (mochi-like balls with different kinds of filling – I got the peanut filling in almond milk soup). I had wanted to go to Kampong Glam, the Muslim quarter, for dinner, so to fill up the time before then I went to check out the Thian Hock Keng temple nearby and the Singapore City Gallery next to it. Both were neat areas to look around – the Singapore City Gallery included a couple scale models of the city, and it was kinda fun to look around to try and find the parts of the city that I’d visited.

From there, I made my way over to Kampong Glam for dinner and looked around there for a little while before realizing that I was absolutely exhausted and headed back to the hotel to bring my stuff to the airport and spend the rest of my time there. Singapore’s airport is practically an attraction in itself – the Changi Jewel is a huge mall and also where the famous indoor waterfall is. I spent some time poking around there, gave my feet a break and sat at a cafe for a little while, and finally boarded my flight to Taiwan.

Taiwan

Much like my arrival in Singapore, I got to Taiwan right around 6am after flying through the night. Thankfully I managed to sleep quite a bit during the night, but I was still pretty wiped by the time I got there. Same deal as Singapore, though – I stored my luggage at the hotel and headed out to explore for a bit before check-in at 3. First thing was food – there was a popular place called Fu Hang Soy Milk that’s famous for their breakfasts. Let me tell you – fresh, warm soy milk is a completely different experience from soy milk in cartons from the grocery store and I still find myself craving it weeks later!

Following breakfast, I went to see the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall. Chiang Kai Shek was the first leader of modern-day Taiwan as we know it, and the place was massive – both the building itself and the grounds surrounding it. I also happened to get there just in time to see a changing of the guards ceremony, which was very cool and reminded me of my days in marching band watching the colorguard.

After that, I went to track down a lunch place for beef noodles, another Taiwan specialty. I found a recommendation for a place online called Lin Dong Fang, and one bite of the noodles was so delicious I almost wanted to cry! Every one of my friends that had been to Taiwan before had raved about the food, and mere hours into my time there I wholeheartedly agreed with them.

That brought me right up to the time to check in at the hotel, and thanks to my overnight flight and the fact I still hadn’t fully recovered from jetlag, my “quick nap” turned into me sleeping until around 8pm. Thankfully the area I was staying in had a lot of quick dinner places, so I grabbed something to eat and ended up just going back to sleep until the next day to try and recover some energy!

The next day started with the first cultural experience that I had booked, a pastry making class at the Kuo Yuan Ye Museum of Cake and Pastry. My friend had introduced me to Klook last summer, a website/app where you can book all sorts of tourist experiences and day tours during travel – which was how I found out about this particular experience (I’m not sponsored for the record lol). One of the well-known desserts of Taiwan is the pineapple cake, which is a jam-like pineapple and wintermelon filling in a flaky crust. The making of the pastry itself wasn’t too hard, and while we waited for them to bake we got a quick tour of the museum and an opportunity to try on some traditional clothes and take pictures! After that, we got our pastries back and got to have a brief afternoon tea session where we could try some other pastries and drink some tea before heading out. Overall a very fun experience!

After that, I was not too far from the National Palace Museum so I headed that way to check it out. That museum in particular has a massive collection of Chinese artifacts, many of which were brought over during the Chinese Civil War when the Nationalist Party came to Taiwan. The building itself was gorgeous and next to a very pretty small garden, and looking through all of the artifacts was also super cool.

It had started raining again by the time I left the museum (be ready for this to be a recurring theme throughout my time in Taiwan) so I decided to hit at least one tourist spot before dinner and hiding indoors. Unfortunately, whether because of the rain or bad timing it was a bit of a dud – I went to the Shilin Night Market, which is the biggest and most tourist-y of Taiwan’s night markets, however because I went so early and because it was raining, there really wasn’t a ton going on there that night. I did get a delicious flatbread with green onions that I am still thinking about, though, so it wasn’t a total loss!

After that, I got a little bit of shopping done in the Ximending district right next to where my hotel was. This is definitely the nighttime shopping/hangout district for the youth in Taiwan, and it was super cool to see it all lit up with all the shops full of people. I got myself some wontons for dinner and broke my own “no buying books” ban within minutes of arriving, but it was worth it.

The next day was a day tour that I had also booked ahead of time to go to a bunch of popular locations located nearby Taipei. We started off at Yehliu Geopark, an area along the coast northeast of Taipei with a ton of interesting geologic formations. The most famous was the Queen’s Head, which I didn’t get the iconic photo of because I didn’t want to wait in like, but a nice Korean tourist took a photo of me from a different angle, so that was nice! You may notice that it is very cloudy in the photos – as seemed to be my luck in Taiwan, it was raining on and off pretty much the whole day trip, but it was still a good time.

After the geopark, we rapid-fire hit a couple famous photo spots. First was the Yin-Yang Sea, which is a stretch of water that has yellow water clashing with the ocean’s blue water in a way that looks pretty cool. There’s a waterfall further up the mountain that goes through a lot of mineral deposits, which turns the water yellow and creates that distinctive color split, much like a yin-yang symbol. After a few minutes taking pictures around there, we went up to take a look at the Golden Waterfall itself, which was very cool to see.

After that, we continued further up the mountain to go Jiufen Old Street, where one of the most famous photo spots in Taiwan is outside of a beautiful old teahouse. The entire street was lined with shops and restaurants, and we were set loose for a couple of hours to find some lunch and do some shopping. I had some xiao long bao for lunch and spent way too long trying to figure out where this iconic photo spot was, actually fully walking past it twice up and down the stairs because I wasn’t looking in the right direction to actually see it. Thankfully I saw a different tour group lining up to take the picture and just… snuck in to get a picture myself, lol.

After that came the final two stops of the tour, Shifen Waterfall and Shifen Old Street. The waterfall was very pretty and the widest waterfall in Taiwan, with our tour guide comparing it to the Niagara Waterfalls in the US. Shifen Old Street is famous mostly for the sky lanterns that you can write a wish on and send up into the sky there! There are train tracks going through the center of the area as well, so every once in a while everyone sending off lanterns had to scramble off the tracks as a train came through. It was very cool to see – I didn’t send off a lantern myself, mainly because they were very large and hard to handle solo. That wrapped up our day tour, and after that the tour bus brought us all back to Taipei. After getting back, I decided I desperately wanted to have an old Shanghai favorite, sheng jian bao （生煎包）and once again nearly cried upon taking the first bite out of deliciousness. I still think about Taiwan’s food, in case you were wondering.

The next day was my final day in Taiwan, so I decided to knock out a bunch of smaller tourist spots. I had once again promised myself I would “take it easy” and… absolutely did not (at this point, my blisters were developing blisters, but I digress). After a breakfast at yet another soy milk breakfast joint (I had a nice conversation with a Korean mother-daughter pair while I was there, and it was fun to surprise them with the fact that I spoke Korean!), I started the day at Longshan Temple, which was just south of my hotel and pretty easy to get to. The area also had a street nearby where tons of herbs and tea was sold, which was pretty neat to see.

After that, I went to check out the Huashan 1914 Creative Park, which was a complex of different buildings and a large park dedicated to unique shops and art exhibits. I actually got there about fifteen minutes before any of the shops actually opened… so I ended up loitering around and taking pictures of the park before circling back and actually doing some souvenir shopping. At one point, I went into a small bookstore and was immediately greeted by a huge cat on the stairs meowing very loudly and making its way directly to me, clearly wanting attention and scratches. Despite being allergic, I ended up giving in – the cat was very friendly, okay! – before looking up and spotting a poster on the wall just above with a drawing of what was clearly this cat and the caption “This huge cat has been assigned to you. You must accept this situation and find joy in it” written on it. Needless to say, I did find joy in that situation!

What I did not find joy in, however, was the situation that followed. I decided to head over to a trail up to a spot called Elephant Mountain that had good views of the city, so I got on a bus heading towards the outskirts of town. However, about halfway there my phone’s screen completely froze and refused to let me get past the home screen at all, instead glitching out and freezing anytime I tried to swipe on the screen. At that time, I didn’t know how to force restart my phone, only the regular restart method… which required me to swipe “turn off” on my screen. The screen that wasn’t working. This left me entirely without the ability to use a map in the middle of Taipei on a bus heading towards the outskirts, which is not an ideal situation!

Thankfully, I’m pretty well versed in using public transportation, so after sitting in a cafe for about an hour and desperately hoping the problem would fix itself, I decided to go back to the hotel. I read all of the bus information cards at the nearby bus stop, found a stop that was familiar to me, got on a bus, got off at a subway station, used the subway map to get back to the station by my hotel, got lost in the station, then got back on track and walked all the way back to my hotel successfully. From there, I used my laptop to google how to force restart my phone, did that, and now my phone works properly again. While I’m glad that worked, out, it was definitely a stressful situation to suddenly find myself in while traveling alone in a foreign country – I think, next time, I’ll just pull someone aside and ask them for help, lol.

After resting at the hotel for a bit to recover from that experience, I decided to give Elephant Mountain another try. This time, I made it there without any mishaps and started making my way up the mountain. I’d read online that it was about 15 minutes to get up to the viewing spot, however the entire trail was just stairs. Nothing else, just stairs going straight up the entire way. Needless to say, my goal of “taking it easy” that day was dead and buried in the ground at that point, but at least I got some very cool pictures out of it!

After seeing the Taipei 101 tower from a distance, I went to see it up close and in person and got tickets to go up to the observatory on the 89th floor. While it was still very cloudy and visibility wasn’t the best, there were still some fantastic views of Taipei at night to see!

To wrap up my time in Taipei, I headed over to the Raohe Night Market. Taiwan’s night markets are pretty famous, with rows of delicious food stalls, drink stalls, games for kids, and more all in one place. Right inside the Raohe market was a Michelin star stall that had black pepper buns, which were buns stuffed with pork seasoned with black pepper sauce and green onions. That was Michelin for a reason – that bun was absolutely delicious, as was pretty much everything else I saw along the packed street as I made my way through.

And that wrapped up my time in Taiwan! I had a flight at a normal time the next day, but still had to get up at a decent time to head over to the airport to head to my next destination – Tokyo.

Japan

The day I arrived in Tokyo was mostly just me getting myself oriented – checking into the hotel, figuring out where to find an ATM for cash (Japan is still a very cash-oriented country rather than using card), getting some food and getting to know the area a bit before crashing for the night (this time at a decent time! We love jetlag recovery). Being in Japan was definitely more daunting than being in either Singapore or Taiwan – in Singapore most people speak English and I do speak fairly decent Chinese, but I do not speak Japanese at all beyond the most basic phrases, which made being there solo a bit daunting. Thankfully most public transportation and tourist areas have multilingual signs and getting around was fine, but things like ordering food were a bit more stressful than I’ve experienced in countries where I do speak the language.

My first full day in Japan included another culture class much like I did in Taiwan, but this class wasn’t until the afternoon, leaving some time to explore in the morning. I started the day by going to Senso-ji, Tokyo’s oldest established Buddhist temple. The entire area was swarmed with tourists, and the entire road leading up to the temple was lined with souvenir shops and food stands. The temple itself was huge and gorgeous, and it was very cool to look around and take pictures. I even stumbled on a trained monkey performance while I was there, which was very cool to watch!

At that point, however, I still didn’t have a proper transportation card to get around the city and had just been operating by buying individual tickets at subway stations, so I decided to go track down a transportation card. Because of a chip shortage, they no longer sold the cards (called IC cards) at every single train station, so I had to go to one of several specific large stations to get one. The station I went to was Ueno Station, and after I succeeded on my quest to get myself an IC card I decided to look around the beautiful Ueno Park that was just outside the station until it was time to head to my class.

The class this time was for making a kind of Japanese sweet called wagashi, which is made using sweet bean paste and decorated with real edible flowers. We made two different types, one that is made into a smooth sphere and another version that almost looks like a rice ball despite both being made from bean paste. The experience also included a tea ceremony with matcha, with our teacher explaining to us what makes matcha different from other kinds of tea. Rather than steeping tea leaves/a tea packet in hot water, matcha is ground into powder and dissolved into hot water, and our teacher even brought out a grindstone that is used to turn the matcha leaves into the powder that would become the tea. We then were shown the correct way to make the tea and how to drink it in the traditional way, which was very cool and the tea and sweets were both delicious!

After the class, I headed over to the nearby Akihabara district to look around. If you’re into anime or Japanese media at all, this is the place to go – there were anime shops everywhere with pretty much everything you could imagine! That was a great way to wrap up my first full day in Tokyo.

The next day was yet another day tour that I’d booked, this time to go and see Mount Fuji and the nearby city of Hakone. This time, the meeting time was at 7:15 am and my hotel was about 45 minutes away, so I had to be up very early once again to make it there. Once the tour started, though, I was very happy I did – our first stop was the fifth station up Mount Fuji, actually pretty high up on the mountain itself. Being able to take a good picture of Mount Fuji is usually extremely dependent on the weather, and when we first stepped off the bus it was cloudy and grey all along – I thought it was going to be a repeat of the extremely cloudy weather all through the day trip I had in Taiwan, honestly. However, after we all went into the building to use the bathroom and peruse the souvenirs, we stepped outside and the weather had completely cleared up in those five-ten minutes we were inside! This cued an entire picture-taking frenzy, and it was super cool to see the top of the mountain like this.

After that, the weather ended up being cloudy again and we never got as clear a shot of the mountain as we did at the fifth station, but I’m glad we got the pictures we did. Our next stop was Gotemba Premium Outlets, a huge outlet mall well-known in the area with a beautiful landscape surrounding it. We were turned loose in there for about an hour, and honestly I spent most of that time in the Lego store and in the Pokemon store. I also got a delicious matcha tea latte.

Next up was the Hakone Ropeway cable car, which we took up to Owakudani. Owakudani is known for the volcanic vents there, along with black eggs cooked in the heat of the volcano that are said to bring longevity. After that, we took the bus back down the mountain to the shore of the lake, where we boarded a pirate ship to ride across the beautiful lake and look at the scenery. It really was gorgeous there – if I ever come to Japan again, I very much want to spend more time in the countryside and see the nature in Japan. I love mountains and the seaside in particular (as anyone who has heard me wax poetic about Tongyeong knows), and Japan has plenty of both that I would love to take more time to see.

That wrapped up the day trip, and after the bus dropped us off I decided to do a bit of shopping in the Shibuya area nearby since I was already there. Shibuya is particularly famous for the largest pedestrian crosswalk in the world, and you can find lots of videos of masses of people crossing it online. As I walked through (taking my own video and pictures, of course) tons of people around me were doing the same! Shibuya is also where the largest Pokemon store is, along with a Nintendo store and various others. Having already bought some stuff at the Pokemon store at Gotemba outlets, I didn’t actually end up buying anything new at this Pokemon store, but the Nintendo store (particularly the Animal Crossing section) did, in fact, make a dent in my wallet.

The next day was my last day in Tokyo and the last day of my trip before I headed off to Seoul! By that point, I was genuinely super exhausted, so I actually had to take it easy. Unfortunately, the day didn’t turn out super well – I’d gone shopping at the Ghibli store and gotten some fun stationery, only to have my shopping bag stolen after I’d accidentally left it in a restaurant’s bathroom. I had only forgotten it for a minute or two (just long enough for me to go down the elevator, realize it’s gone, and go back up) but it was already gone and none of the staff had seen it. That was a profoundly disappointing way to close out the afternoon, so I did a bit of sightseeing around the Imperial Palace before heading back to the hotel to finish packing for Korea the next day.

And now I’m here! I ended up staying in Seoul for about six days, meeting up with old friends, relaxing, and enjoying the free time before CLS starts. Technically, I’m writing this on Day 2 of the program – on Tuesday, I brought all my stuff to Incheon Airport to meet up with the cohort and take the bus down to Gwangju, followed by two days of orientation. I want to write more in-detail about the CLS experience specifically in a different blog post – I want to do another organized week-by-week breakdown of the program like I did last time, so look forward to those posts coming throughout the summer!

If you made it this far, thank you for reading this long, long post. Until next time!