When I was younger I wanted to be a vet, before that I wanted to be an actress and after that I was doing research on how to become a librarian. And just like when I was younger, I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up. Even though I technically should already be a grown up. Right now I want to be a travel guide or a flight attendant, even though I'm deadly scared I'm deadly scared of flying and don't want to give up my nose piercing. What I want to do when I grow up keeps changing the same way it changed when I was younger. I can't seem to be able to decide what I want to do for the rest of my life. Some people keep telling that at my age I should start preparing to settle down and to start figuring out what I want to do with life. But my life is just beginning. Why should I, at the beginning of my life, already know what I want to do for the next 60 or 70 years?

The photos used in this photo are taken from my travels.

It's only starting to hit me that in two weeks I'm no longer in Korea. I honestly have no idea what to do when I go back to Finland. How do things even work in Finland? Do I bow when I go to the store? Do I even greet the worker at the shop? How do I go to school? How does finnish university even work? The other day I even forgot where I live in Kuopio, because I haven't been to my own apartment in over half a year now. I actually had to message my friend and ask her what my address is and what floor do I live in.. And I'm pretty sure she thought I was drunk..
Of course it's nice to go back again and get to eat Fazer's chocolate and proper breakfast again. And I get to cook again! If I still remember how.. I haven't been able to cook or bake since the end of May and it has slowly started to drive me insane. Who would have known that there would be a day when I wish I could cook to myself again. I honestly hated it so much before. Now all I can just about is what I'm going to cook first as soon as I get to my apartment on the 22nd. I can't wait to be able to eat whatever I cook myself.
Now that my return to Finland is getting nearer and nearer I just keep thinking about the things that I miss there. It's funny how previously the only thing I've missed has been my friends and my family, but now I've started to realize that I've actually missed a lot of other stuff. Like normal bread. Bread, that is not sweet but salty. I don't honestly understand how Koreans can eat the "bread" they sell here. It's more like a pastry than a bread. I've also missed cheap fruit and vegetables. Bananas are no longer going to pay me 5,000 won but instead just few euros.
And talking about money.. I don't have to change wons to euros in my head anymore. I can just instantly know the price and whether or not it's expensive. And I don't have to pay to withdraw money from my account! Nor do I actually have to carry cash around or go to the ATM to check how much money I have on my account.
There are so may things I've missed about Finland without even realizing it. But there are so many different things that I'm going to miss about Korea too. Like how my school building right next door and Juicy (oh my dear Juicy please come to Finland) and the subway and the big city and the people I've met here and so many other things. I will miss learning korean and speaking english all the time. I will miss being surrounded by people who have no idea what I'm talking when I speak in finnish. I will even miss those weird guys that ask for pictures with you when you're out with your friends. I don't even know why, I'll just miss them, even though I always found them creepy.
I shouldn't think about the things that I'm going to miss yet, I still have few weeks left. But I can't really help but think that soon I'm out of Korea and I might not be able to come back here in a really long time. My time in Korea has been just amazing, even though sometimes I really haven't felt like that. But it has. I don't really know when it will really really hit me that I realize that this might be the last time seeing most of these people and the last time of me studying abroad (thought at the moment I am seriously considering doing a double degree which would mean a year of studying in belgium).
It still feels so unreal, that after almost 7 months abroad I actually have to return to Finland.
In the beginning of this year I definitely would not have believed how big of an impact Germany and Korea would leave on me and how much would happen on my 7 month adventure.
I still can't believe I'm actually going home.

Today our school organized our 4th, and last, CAU Korea Exploration Program (or shortly CKEP). We left early in the morning towards Paju, which is located at Gyeonggi province. Our first destination was Camp Greaves, former US base know as a filming spot of the korean drama Descendants of the Sun. Descendants of the Sun is one of my favorite dramas, so it was really interesting to go there. And we even got to wear the uniforms, take lots of photos and make our own dog tags. I wrote my name in korean (안니) and Korea 2017 to mine. Visiting the place honestly made me feel like rewatching the drama again since I don't really remember that much about it.

Me and my friend in our military uniforms

After Camp Greaves we ate our free lunch and headed to the 3rd tunnel. The 3rd tunnel is a tunnel digged by North Koreans and it was designed for a suprise attack on Seoul from North Korea. The North Korea however claimed they built it for coal mining, but that is not possible since there is no coal in the soil at that area. We walked down a really steep incline and the tunnel just kept getting smaller and smaller until you had to walk with your head bowed down. At the end of the tunnel we got to see the second barricade. Getting down there was really easy, but going back was a completely different thing. Unfortunately we were not allowed to take photos in the tunnel, and after coming up I was too tired to even take photos from around and just went back to the bus instead.

After the 3rd tunnel we started heading to the Dora observatory, where you could actually see one of North Korean's cities, Gaeseong and a village called Kijong-dong. It is also know as a propaganda village, since the North Korean propaganda music is played there and the city is empty. Unfortunately the view wasn't the best possible since there was quite a lot of fog. We could actually hear North Korean propaganda music being played from other side of the border. I've also heard that once South Korea got revenge on that by playing known south korean pop from their side's speakers. 

You can't really see it from this photo, but over there in the fog is Gaeseong and on the right is the propaganda village.

We only had 20 minutes of time to be at the observatory since our schedule was kind of tight. When we were done at the observatory our next destination was the Dorasan station. It is South Korea's most northern train station and the first station towards North. It is only used once a day for tourists travelling from Seoul to DMZ area and it was built in hope of the Koreas uniting one day. If the Koreas were to be united the trains would be able to come all the way from Europe to Seoul. I really wish I get to see Koreas unite in my lifetime and get to take the train from Russia, near the Finnish border, all the way to Seoul. 

The station is 205 kilometres from the North Korean capital Pyeongyang and 56 kilometres from Seoul. It is also located just 7 kilometres from Gaeseong.

Sometimes because of homesickness and feelings of loneliness I forget how lucky I am to be in Seoul. The other day I had the worst case of homesickness in my whole time here. All of my friends were either busy or I just didn't feel like bothering them, so I was just in my room. Bored, homesick and feeling kind of lonely. So I went out for a walk. I got lost and walked way too much with wrong pair of shoes, but I got to see so many beautiful views on my way. And it made me remember again how lucky I was to be in this beautiful city.
After walking for god knows how long, I ended up to a subway station and just decided to take the subway back home. Just the fresh air and the views I saw made my day so much better and made me forget about all the homesickness. Because I remembered again why I do this, why time after time I go to places where I know no one and leave my comfort zone. I do it because if I stay home, I wouldn't be able to see so many beautiful places, I wouldn't be able to meet people from all over the world and I wouldn't be able to experience the things I've experienced while being on my adventures. I am so lucky to be here, but sometimes I just seem to forget that.
That's all for today, see you next time.

The island is not that big so it doesn't take more than 4~5 hours to explore everything, making it a good day trip destination from Seoul.

Finally got around writing the part two from my small trip to Shanghai. The first part you can find here. 


On the third day of being in Shanghai, I got to sleep quite long. And that made me so much more happier.  Because we didn't have that much planned we just decided to go shopping. My goal was to find a backbag and a winter jacket. Well.. I didn't find either one of those. Did I find anything else? Nope. And why is that? Because I thought that I had no money left, but on my last day it turned out that I had completely forgotten about the money I exchanged beforehand in Korea.. You should've seen how pissed I was at my own stupidity..


On the fourth day, we got some breakfast at the hotel (best breakfast I've had in a while) and headed out. Truthfully I wasn't quite sure what our destination was, since my friend had planned everything out. When we arrived at the subway station we started having a bit of a problems of finding how to get to the destination: China Art Museum.
After wandering around in a shopping mall looking for a way out for almost an hour, we found our way out and towards the art museum. There was no entrance fee which was awesome, since I still thought at that point that I had no money..


After the museum we decided to jump into one of those tourist buses. It cost us 40 RMB (~5 €) which was really cheap to me. We got to see quite a lot and in the end we ended up taking two different tours that were both included into the price. But we kind of realized too late that we were nowhere near Shanghai Tower where we were planning on going to next. So we jumped off the bus and started looking for a subway to get to our destination. It took us a while.. And when we finally found the subway and got to the Shanghai Tower it was already dark.



Our first plan was to arrive just before sunset so we would get to see the sunset, but since we got lost earlier we were a bit late. But the night view is not that bad either. There were so many lights and seeing Shanghai from waaaay up high made me realize how big of a place Shanghai actually is. The Shanghai Tower is world's second highest building and I'm so happy we went to see it. I definitely recommend going there when visiting Shanghai. My friend told me that the better known Pearl Tower was apparently not worth the money but I don't really know about that since I didn't go to Pearl Tower.
After spending few hours at the Shanghai Tower we decided to head back to the hotel since I had to wake up quite early the next morning for my flight back to dear Seoul.

Oopsiedaisie, almost a month went by without a single new post. Well, let's just say that life has been kinda busy. But yeah, let's get into the post now without further ado.
I went to Shanghai last Thursday for 5 days to see my friend, who is there as an exchange student for a semester, and came back this Monday. It was really interesting to get to see a completely different culture from what I've gotten used to here in Korea. Sometimes I was really confused, because I'm already used to Korean culture and their manners. I've divided my Shanghai trip to two different parts, because I feel like it would be waaaay too long as a one post.

I learned how to make gifs so I turned my snapchat story from Thursday into one, just for the heck of it.

On Thursday when I arrived my friend came to get me from the airport and had to wait for me an hour longer than expected because the lines in the customs were so fricking long. I couldn't reach her in any way because my Korean phone didn't work and my Finnish phone refused to send her text messages for some reason.. And of course the wifi at the airport only worked if you had a Chinese phone number. Not such a good start to the trip, to be quite honest :'D.
When I finally got through customs and got my luggage my friend guided me through subway to the subway station near the hotel. Well... Apparently there's two same hotels with a same name :''D. And of course we ended up going to the wrong one.. Thankfully the "wrong" hotel called us a taxi and we finally got to the right hotel, which wasn't that far away thankfully. After getting my stuff to the hotel we just went to eat and after that straight to bed because by that point I was already exhausted.

On the second day we headed to one of the most magical places on earth, DISNEYLAND!! I've never been to Disneyland before so I was really excited about it. Even though we arrived quite early there was already a lot people queing up for the rides. We had to queue for each ride at least 40 minutes.. And I'm not a really patient person.. But we survived and got into at least the most popular rides. My favorite one was definitely the Tron one and in the end we ended up going to that one twice. We left quite early because I was already sick with the flu when we came there and by the end of the evening I started to feel even more sicker. So it was better to leave early than stay longer and to get sicker.