Hola! Hello! Bonjour! 아녕아세요!! My name is Julia Jazmin Hernandez-Espinoza and I am Latina-Americana. A born and raised Oregonian but definitely not a natural hiker! Currently at the University of Oregon, I am in my fourth year and this fall term I am studying abroad at Korea University which is a beloved private college in South Korea. Exploring life outside of a small city and being a study abroad student has been a life-long dream that I constantly carried within my goals. However what impacted my decision the most to depart from Eugene and head out to Seoul was a strong wish for an international student perspective! I can’t wait to learn everything that comes my way and bring all these new lessons back home with me to Oregon.
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Growing up I have always loved being around international students and communities because to me diversity and being different is what makes the world so beautiful and interesting. Being a study abroad student myself has been my dream since I learned of its existence, so through these blogs I hope to share a little bit about my personal journey for anyone who wonders what it’s like through a point of view like my own. To explain a bit more about how I see things, a conformist, traditional mentality, and simple individual is the complete opposite of what you could describe me as because I detest settling for anything even up to the meals that I eat. So as I prepared to set forward with my GEO program to South Korea I wanted to know as much as possible about what a person who gets loud when they get excited and has to take a long minute to choose what they want to eat type of person was going to face abroad. The things I wanted to know before arriving were simple, like who to contact when I needed help, and what actions were disrespectful within Korean culture. That type of thing has been helpful but my arrival was still very chaotic and a super funny story if you ask my friends.
The afternoon we landed in Korea was a very humid and cloudy day, and I was with five new friends from UO as we walked out together through the doors of the Incheon airport. We went through it all: a lost wallet, a lost phone, a missed train, too much luggage, too much hunger, too much sweat, and a whole lot of confusion. Yet we were all excited and continued to try and be positive as we knew coming in, that those were the type of challenges we would possibly face. Now as I have lived here for a couple days I can personally say that yes, it is definitely a rollercoaster of experiences and feelings that come with arriving to a drastically new environment such as South Korea. And of course there are surprises like realizing that trash cans are extremely hard to find.
But what I can say about Seoul and South Korea specifically through a Latina-American perspective is that this place is so much like Mexico. It feels like I entered an alternate universe where it's Mexico but Korean style, and I find it so interesting. If you visit here you can totally see the similarities, and through my American side, I can say that the sizes of things here are very different from our own and everything is so sweet in contrast to having savory as a common option back home. For now that’s a snapshot of my journey but I hope to have a lot more to share soon.
화이팅!!
By Jazmin Hernandez-Espinoza, Diverse Ducks Ambassador
Korea University Exchange, Fall 2023
Read More from Jaz Hernadez-Espinoza
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