- All the videos I made in Seoul
capture about 1% of everything that happened in Seoul.
Today I'm gonna try and capture some of the stories
that I didn't share.
The wholesome little moments of learning Korean,
the casual magic and the beauty of Seoul,
the tea, the days of pure adventure,
and meeting some of the most interesting people.
Hey there guys.
And welcome back to UnJaded Jade.
Welcome to,
me being home.
I got home from Seoul three days ago,
which is crazy because it meant I got to see my family
for the first time in nine months.
I didn't even realized just how long I was away for.
It was so long, I literally could have had a baby.
I am back, I am in quarantine.
And something that I do on the plane journey home
from anywhere that's been meaningful
is I sit and journal about my time there.
I write about the people
who made my experiences most meaningful.
I reflect on all my favorite moments.
By the end of the three hours of writing, I was sobbing.
I was listening to my music, which was meaningful to Seoul.
And yeah, you guys feel like my friends,
so welcome to some cute stories from Seoul.
Okay, I have to tell you the most serendipitous,
incredible thing that could have happened.
So the day after finals, you know, we are dead.
We are exhausted.
We have just pulled a bunch of all-nighters
to get our essays in.
But naturally, what do we decide to do?
We decide to hike the biggest mountain in Seoul,
the biggest mountain, I think in the north of South Korea.
We just kept saying we'd do it all semester
and kept putting it off.
So we were like, no, tomorrow has excellent weather
we're gonna do it.
Me and my friends dragged ourselves to this mountain.
It was very steep, very intense, but so beautiful.
And you had these moments where you had to
physically drag yourself up ropes of these rocks.
And, there's just mountains around you.
And it's all green and gorgeous.
And there's like helicopters going around, utterly surreal.
If you go to Seoul, please hike Bukhansan.
We got lost, classic.
But my housemate Duke just decided to ask a random woman.
So we stopped this woman.
It turns out she actually did speak pretty good English
which was amazing.
And she told us, she pointed us down one way.
We said goodbye annyeonghaseyo, goodbye.
Probably never see you again.
Thank you for the instructions.
But about an hour later,
we stumbled into her, on the same path.
And me and Duke were walking about the same pace to her,
but we started asking her questions.
It turns out this woman has the most fascinating life.
Her name is JuYoung or Julie.
This woman is a powerhouse entrepreneur.
She has many different brands within Korea.
She had hiked Bukhansan on the day before,
she was hiking it again that day, just for fun
on the weekend.
She looked so unassuming,
just this solo female hiker, but she was so inspiring.
She's traveled the world.
She was also casually a professor
at a university in Seoul, Seoul National University
which is one of the top three.
And we just spoke to her for about an hour.
And she was also very inspiring as a woman who is single,
and has never been married, but is so content.
She was so happy with her life,
and it was so inspiring to see.
She's like, yeah, I don't want kids.
I love my life.
I love exploring traveling, hiking,
I love my projects, my businesses.
But then towards the end of the hike, she said to us,
would you like to come for lunch
at my restaurant in Gangnam, for a free meal?
Like what Julie?
You're so nice.
And obviously we were going to say yes
because it was so kind of her,
and also because Seoul is expensive and we are Uni students.
And so the next day me and my friends went
for a free meal with Julie at her restaurant.
Hey Greens, you can go visit it in Gangnam.
And it was fascinating seeing her in the hiking outfit,
and then seeing this like incredible, put
together business woman the next day.
And we just sat with her, talked about life,
talked about what happiness means,
all these deep, interesting questions.
And to me, this is what life is about.
Life is meeting strangers who are strangers
for two seconds.
And then you realize
that everyone wants similar things in life.
Everyone wants happiness.
Everyone wants to be around like-minded interesting people
and have these, these moments, these conversations.
She's so passionate about health and organic food.
And I was just, wow.
It was such a cool experience.
And then, hello.
I don't know if we have any army in the room
but you're going to be jealous my friends,
I went on a BTS themed day.
Can you imagine being in Seoul
where there's like billboards of BTS everywhere
and then you get to go to BTS theme day, like, wow.
If you don't know who to BTS are, they are an incredible,
K-pop boy group.
They're so talented
but they also sing about really deep, meaningful topics.
How often does pop music touch on the shadows
of the soul, and the ego and self love and its importance,
but all wrapped up in some beautiful beats.
So for context, at my university, every city that we go to
we do a mini internship in the city.
These are called civic projects,
and we have civic partners that you can sign
up to be a part of that project, that business, that
nonprofit or whatever, whatever project they're offering.
Two of the civic partners have a startup
really interesting app.
So they're hiring students
for business development, and I didn't work with them,
but I was really interested in what they did.
And one of my housemates became really
good friends with them,
I spoke to them, and these two civic partners Si and Duyon.
I can't even express it, how kind these people were.
They took me and Duke
on a road trip to the border of North and South Korea,
which is the demilitarized zone, the DMZ.
I learned a lot about the history of the Korean war.
Both these civic partners served in the Korean military.
So they brought a really interesting perspective
when we were on this tour.
But when we were in the car to the DMZ,
they noticed that me and Duke
knew almost every BTS song that they were playing.
And so during final season, when we were half dead,
they offered to take us on a BTS themed day.
And, it was just incredible.
I wore my cookie socks, and it was so cool
because it was the cafe where they used to go in
between rehearsals before they were super famous.
It was an explosion of merch.
I got cute stickers.
Ah look, they're so cute.
I love it.
It was such a cool experience.
And then to top it off, Si and Duyon took us in their car,
and we traveled for like two
and a half hours to this museum where Namjoon,
AKA RM, AKA my bias, AKA just peaceful king.
He visited, and he got really inspired
by this museum and he took some really cool photos there.
So naturally, we recreated some of his photos,
and it was so much fun.
(upbeat music)
It was a museum focused
on humans' relationship to ink, and writing.
And it sort of followed the journey
of the printing press, different methods
of producing ink, ending with some really incredible art.
It was the dreamiest location.
It was in the middle of the mountains,
the whole car journey we were just listening to BTS.
That was just an incredible, memory day,
the most surreal day.
How do you feel right now?
- Life is good.
- Sorry to just pop in here, but I was editing,
and I just have a really quick story I had to share.
I did my best to learn a bit of Korean,
but like my Korean, absolutely sucks.
I can understand a few words, I can get by.
But one day I was coming out of my local e-mart,
and the lovely man who's always at the shop
called out to me and he said,
oneul eodi gyo, but he said it so quickly.
And so I had no idea what he was saying.
And so I just nodded and I was like, de, which means, yes.
And then, kind of left.
And then when I left, I was repeating it to myself slowly
in my head or oneul, eoti, gyo, where are you going today?
It was this crazy bitter sweet moment of being like, wow
I actually understood a Korean sentence being used day
to day, but I just couldn't reply
to him in the moment, which is really sad.
It is moments like that
that reminds you why learning languages is so cool though.
I was like, yes, level one of talk
to me in Korean was worth it for that one moment.
Okay, this is a story time that is less
exciting and wonderful.
I got incredibly burnt out this semester.
This was the hardest semester for me mentally.
The probably the least enjoyable,
just because I was stressed a lot of the time.
Mid semester,
I was,
still deep in writing the last chapters of this book.
I had three essays due that week.
We have six classes a week
but each one is two hours of prep.
And if you miss a class,
you have to do a thing called makeup work,
which is writing an essay
about the class that you have to re watch
the recording right?
This essay, answer loads of questions about the class.
Like Minerva,
I can, one day, I'm going to talk about this in depth.
It is hard.
It is watching your friends deteriorate.
It is you juggling your mental health when you're
in this brand new place with no stability,
having so much freaking work to do.
It was tough.
And then I have my two beloved roommates
but sometimes you just need that time to
relax, and sort your head out.
So just before I fully burnt out,
I hired an Airbnb for a few days.
And went there, and collapsed.
Yeah, so even though I loved Seoul, it wasn't all rosy.
There were definitely some tough, tough points.
And also because I had so much work, I just hated
that I couldn't put any energy into being creative,
and these platforms that I love or having roommates,
it's just so hard to kick them out
when they want to have a nap
because they're exhausted, because I wanna film a video.
I'm not going to do that.
So yeah, just a lot of, a lot of juggling and challenges.
But having said that I loved this semester.
The last thing I'm gonna talk
about is the internship that I did end up doing,
which was with a nonprofit called Down School.
They support the resettlement of North Korean refugee
teenagers and kids in South Korea.
I don't know how much you know about North Korea.
That's okay if you don't know much,
I didn't know that much until a few years ago
when I started reading into it.
Bit of a humanitarian crisis,
the government are incredibly restrictive.
People don't have freedom of speech, freedom of movement.
People can be persecuted
for just having an opinion against the government,
which leads a lot of people to want to escape.
Whether through China, for example
they can cross the Yangtze River.
You can also try and escape through Russia, or you can try
and cross the border between North and South Korea.
The demilitarized zone,
all of these areas are heavily militarized,
and heavily secured.
So it's really hard.
And if you get found out, for trying to leave,
the punishments are horrendous.
But even when people are finally managed to resettle
into South Korea, as legal refugees,
they face so much discrimination in South Korea.
I did not realize how challenging it would be
for North Korean people.
Even though they all speak Korean,
it's a different dialect.
So they struggled to communicate
with south Koreans in a way that's natural,
which can prevent them getting jobs as easily.
It's also a huge education gap,
because education in North Korea is really different to
South Korea.
Also South Korea is they have such a hustle work culture.
It is mad, super hierarchical.
People get a super early, stay super late.
In some establishments,
you can't leave before your boss
because it's a sign of disrespect.
This nonprofit helps support young North Korean
teenagers integrate with South Koreans,
in a way that lets them like cherish their roots,
be proud of their roots, rather
than North Koreans joining South Korean schools,
and having to hide the fact that they're North Korean,
because of peer pressure, social pressure.
That's really cool.
It's an integrated school, the South Korean,
and North Korean kids, but they rely on donors.
So the project that I joined on to is,
how can we fundraise more money
through storytelling and videography?
I had to put in an application,
and it was such a cool experience.
Not only to tell these people's stories through being part
of a videography team, having translators, also
it made me feel like, wow, even though
I've never ever studied film or anything in media,
I've learned so much just
from watching YouTube videos, and doing this.
For example, one of the team asked me to go set up lapel
mics on the students,
and I knew how to do it because I've just learned.
Some of this techie stuff,
and it was a really cool experience to act
as like an assistant director, and create storyboards,
and think about the B roll shots we wanted to get,
and work with this language barrier.
And also trying to think
about my own bias that I might be bringing
into telling a story like this,
and how you can mitigate that.
Yeah, so I got to meet two of the students,
and we created these amazing videos.
And I also got to work
with one of my friends who is an animator.
She created some awesome animations for it.
Through a uni event,
I also got to meet Jessie from Jessie's kitchen.
She is a chef, a North Korean chef, who was trying to
bring north Korean cuisine to the world,
and she was on Netflix.
She's just this powerhouse businesswoman.
She's insane.
I love her.
And I got to have a cooking master class
with her to make tofu parcels,
Yubuchobap.
I also got to hear a lot about her experience
as a North Korean,
trying to set up this insane, wonderful business in Seoul.
One of my bucket list items was, I wanted to
cycle the Han River, which is the massive river going
through Seoul.
One random night after classes,
I asked my friend, I was like, do you wanna go cycle?
Let's do it.
We hired a tandem bike.
I was just an idiot.
I was trying to communicate in, my very poor Korean.
And I thought that we could return this bike at any point,
any bike point along the Han River, but this was not true.
We had to return to the same point.
So we bought one hour of time on the bike,
and we go, we're cycling along.
It's our first time on a bike in months.
So we're powering down the river.
It's mainly downhill.
We were challenging ourselves to get as far away
as we could within one hour.
Except when we got to the place, we found out
that we could not put our bike at any place along the river,
it had to be returned to the same one.
Which also meant we had to pay
for every 15 minutes over that one hour that we were.
The bike was also too big to fit on a bus,
because it was a massive tandem bike.
We were over an hour away down the river,
but we meant we had to cycle up hill,
up the river, and the place was going to close at 10:00 PM.
And I've honestly never cycled so fast in my life.
Me and this girl were just like,
sweaty,
puffing,
messes,
cycling our way uphill,
up the river.
We got there at 10:00 PM exactly.
This man was literally closing up the kiosk,
closing up all the bikes.
We had to go and beg him to take our bike,
so that we didn't have to pay
for overnight charge for this bike.
It was just a palava.
I mean, this girl collapsed by the river.
We just got something from e-mart, and we're laughing
and looking out all the lights of the beautiful city.
It's just moments like that.
I have so many little stories like this,
befriending locals, at my favorite vegan restaurants,
and being given a free cookie during final season
because they noticed I was stressed.
You know, little things like this, are just absolutely what
I'm going to remember what made Seoul feel
like home in the end.
The incredible days,
the tough burnout days, the people I met,
the little funny things that happened,
the palavas, the me getting the wrong bus and ending
up like two hours outside of Seoul, and all of these things.
I don't know.
I just feel like I have a more chilled person having lived
in Korea because, it was very out of my comfort zone.
And I've just learned to love it.
If you made this point in the video, I thank you so much
for listening to my little story times, as I say,
I'm now back in the UK, I have more time to film videos.
And put to create energy back into this.
So tell me what you'd like to see.
I hope life is treating you well.
I am sending you a big hug from afar, and yeah,
lots of love.
Bye.
(Upbeat music)