TIMELINE
How it started
One of the questions I get asked most is: why are you traveling solo to a foreign country (South Korea) for 3 months to learn the language? To fully explain this, you can follow the full timeline below (don’t worry it’s summarized and not THAT long.
If you want an even shorter version: Yes, it started out with BTS, a popular Korean Pop band, but many other factors applied to get where I am today. Like for example: a master thesis and a 6-day trip to Los Angeles for a concert. Want to know how this connects….
On May 26th this first time (solo) South Korean journey comes to an end, but it will only be the start! On to the next one as there is more than enough still on my South Korea sightseeing wishlist. Jeju Island for example, which we had to miss out on this time.
Let me know if you have any tips by sending me a message here as I will definitely be back!
Of course I spent a generous amount of my first 10 weeks in Seoul sightseeing and exploring. So this gives me the perfect opportunity to share some of these top experiences and hotspots as well as do some extra 'bigger things', like day trips to Lotte World, Nami Island and the Korean Folk Village.
Let me know if you have any tips by sending me a message here!
One of the things I absolutely wanted to do was visit the sea in Busan. We will be going by KTX train to Busan and once there visit tourist spots like Haeundae Beach, Busan Gamcheon Culture Village and ride the Haeundae Sky Capsules.
Let me know if you have any tips by sending me a message here!
Happy 26th birthday to me! This birthday will be a special one (bit of double feelings) as it will be the first one spent without family, but! In South Korea, on vacation, with my boyfriend.
Do you know any South Korean must-do birthday activities? Let me know by sending me a message here!
May 10th marks the last day of my language learning program with EF. A day after (on my birthday!) my boyfriend will arrive in Korea and we will have the opportunity to explore South Korea together in 2 weeks.
To settle down a bit (and get over the jetlag) we will be spending the first few days in Seoul doing some café hopping, visiting some tourist hotspots and overall take it easy.
Let me know if you have any tips by sending me a message here!
On this day I will fly to Korea to start my solo trip and in the flesh introduction to South Korea. I will be staying with a hosting family in Seoul for the first 10 weeks, during which I will be learning Korean through a learning program by EF, while also creating content on this blog and a variety of social media platforms.
Afterwards I will have a 2-week vacation, during which I plan to visit other parts of Korea. Let me know if you have any tips by sending me a message!
These are the 6 weeks after the official launch of my blog website on social media.
I will be writing some Korea and Hallyu info blogs and in the 2 weeks before my flight to Korea I will also start with the first travel blogs to give an insight into everything that comes with planning a solo trip to South Korea.
All travel blogs can be found here.
2024
For the past 2 years I have learned the basics of Korean language through this LOI course and some gamified learning apps. I cannot yet say I have mastered all grammar described in the book, but it's a start!
In the end I decided on a 3-month stay in Seoul, hopefully enough time to learn the basics about South Korea at the heart of it all. Through online research I found out that culture, especially Asian cultures, can be experienced best through locals, therefore I chose to stay with a hosting family. This was easily combined with my wish to also develop my Korean language skills in a 10-week language program, with the help of EF.
After my trip to Los Angeles in 2021 and graduation in 2022 I started to save up for the next step of my journey: visiting South Korea. In the beginning I wasn’t sure what this would look like: a vacation, alone or with someone, a longer stay? BUT! At some point I made a promise to myself:
“I will visit South Korea before I turn 25”
Somehow, life happened. I found a job in retail marketing (which I became interested in after researching the marketing structures behind K-pop), I bought an apartment with my boyfriend and moved out of my parents house. The initial plan was adjusted, and adjusted some more, but I kept working towards that goal and will now be able to realize it before the age of 26, a birthday I will be celebrating in South Korea.
Some days I still feel like I am recovering (in a good way) from my 2021 concert experience and 2021-2022 Hallyu research.
Even the “hiatus” of BTS group activities that was announced on July 14th, 1 day after the birthday of ARMY, a widely celebrated holiday celebrated by ARMY in the form of the FESTA week could not push me off of cloud nine.
In summary: over the course of 2022 and 2023 I solidified my attraction to and knowledge about K-products / Hallyu, South Korea and it’s culture and language, with a huge influence and support of social media (this feels like a good moment to say “I told you so” in reference to my thesis). Some highlights:
- Visiting concerts in cinema:
- Permission to Dance in Seoul (finale) 12-03-2022
- Coldplay Live Broadcast From Buenos Aires (featuring Jin of BTS) 26-03-2023
- Agust D Tour ‘D-day’ in Cinema 04-06-2023
- Dying my hair purple [blog: why is purple so important to BTS fans a.k.a. ARMY)
- Getting 3 BTS tattoos [heart, outline & 134340]
- Visiting a variety of BTS, K-pop and in general Asian (with a focus on Korea) hotspots in the Netherlands [summer/ July 2022 and on]
- Visiting a BTS Fan Party in Utrecht 26-03-2023
- Taking a step further in my language learning through an LOI course > also incorporate Duolingo earlier)
Over the course of 6 months I learned a lot about not only K-pop, but also Hallyu a.k.a. the Korean Wave (including all forms of K-products) as a whole and its attached complex marketing strategies involving not only South Korea’s entertainment industry, but the country as a whole. I specifically focussed on the role of fans in K-pop in my final thesis named: [name & link this]. At 23:59 I officially handed in my thesis.
2022-2023
After spotting ARMY at the airport, it was time to fly back to the Netherlands. It was a very wholesome experience in all and a trip I will remember for life.
For those interested in the short summary I made a vlog [LINK] about my trip to Los Angeles in the style of 1 of the band members’ (Jungkook) vlog video’s under the name A.C.F.
After the concert it was straight on to the bus to Goleta, southern Santa Barbara County, California the next day to visit family. I left the girls, or I should say newly made friends at this point, and went on a 2 hour trip which I fully used to relive the (concert) experiences of the past day.
It was 2 days spent meeting and talking to family I had never or only scarcely seen in real life, I went shopping, eating out and mostly talking, catching up and sharing.
The day I would see BTS live had arrived. Due to my jetlagged early sleeping time I joined 3 of the girls in my dorm when they woke up at 4AM to go to the SoFi Stadium, where the concert was set to take place at 7PM, to stand in line for merchandise. At 10:30AM we were among the first people to make it to the front of the line, and half of the merchandise was already sold out. Managed to score 2 shirts, which I still wear quite often as a reminder of my trip and first BTS concert experience.
The rest of the day was spent enjoying the several instagrammable photo spot decors (of course after waiting in line for up to 2 hours), overpriced foods, meeting new people and getting in line (again) for the COVID checks and concert venue entrance.
And then of course, the concert, which was amazing. I was part of the Purple wave for the first time! And I hope for many more in the future.
Consisted of trying to get into the Line Friends store again (Spoler alert: failed again), waiting in line for more K-pop shops (got in this time!), visiting musea BTS members visited (delayed, because I waited in line for the K-pop stores longer than expected), taking a lot of pictures, being quite jetlagged and thus falling asleep at 9PM.
Honestly, the most weird, fun and surprising part about this day is that I started asking all the K-pop fans waiting in all those lines to fill in my thesis survey and in the end talked to over 150 (genuinely interested) fans because of it.
The day had come I flew halfway across the earth, 13 hours on my first ever overseas flight, on my own and all to see BTS live. I had everything planned out: a hostel, shops I wanted to visit, sightseeing I wanted to do and an additional trip to a relative living 2 hours away from Los Angeles.
I arrived in my hostel in a 10-person girls’ dorm, which conveniently hosted 4 other ARMY, which is how the fans of BTS are called. And promptly got taken in an evening of waiting in line of the Line Friends store on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (BTS hotspot for reasons listed in [this blog]) and having dinner at In ‘n Out burger as a consolation when we couldn’t get in before closing time (quite logical in retrospect when there are 4 shows hosting 80.000 fans per show, most of which were staying in LA)
I was in the second month of research for my thesis. With the help of (among others) [main thesis book] I got to know about South Korea’s Culture, language, with a focus on it’s influences in K-pop, K-dramas and other K-culture products.
My knowledge about the structures behind K-pop and South Korea as a country only heightened my interest in BTS. The group had just announced that 1 of their scheduled concerts in Los Angeles to promote their 3rd English song Permission to Dance was approved to continue under high COVID guidelines. And I wanted to go! I had saved up quite a bit of money and in a stroke of luck got tickets for a relatively good price. I was going to Los Angeles to see BTS live.
This is actually not quite as weird or as impulsive as you would think, taking into account:
- [blog] Mandatory military service
- [blog] 7-year curse
Okay, I might have been living a bit online in the beginning of 2021, but who wasn’t. Back to real life: I was still in the middle of achieving my Master’s Degree in Communication Science (University of Amsterdam). At the end of the academic year in May I had decided on the topic for my thesis: COVID. During my first meeting with my supervisor in September he told me: “Do you really want to spend the next 6 months of your life thinking about COVID?” (Little did we know…) “What do you really like?” And because I had just spent my whole summer vacation watching a variety of interviews, playing games, filmed vacations and what not of BTS, of course my answer was: “K-pop”
The algorithm had decided: I was into K-pop. I landed again at 'that K-pop boyband from the ad': BTS, or fully Bangtan Seonyeondan, roughly translated as the bulletproof boy scouts. I found out that after their first fully English song Dynamite (the one from the ad), a second fully English song was on the way and there was a teaser! I invite you to watch this amazing 24 second teaser, especially if you have no knowledge of K-pop whatsoever. I might be biased, but you will be hooked on K-pop for the rest of your life (dramatic much).
For 3 full days I was on the edge of my chair for these 7 normal boys from Korea (it’s a reference. If you know, you know. Or just watch this.) and browsed through their YouTube channel: BangtanTV. And on the 21st of May the MV (a.k.a. Music Video) of Butter was released, with million dollar outfits, perfectly matched steps, beautiful decors and a storyline behind every detail in the music video. And the real promotion schedule was just getting started with live performances planned, interviews, shows and what more. Enough to look forward to for the next few months.
It’s quite cliché, really, but it was the start of the COVID lockdowns in the Netherlands and I had quite some time to spare suddenly. Some of Netflix’ latest releases somehow caught my attention. Especially the 3rd and last part of the To All the Boys I’ve Loved before trilogy: To All The Boys: Always and Forever that was set to release on February 12th.
With the catchy tune of I Love You Always Forever (Betty Who, 2016 cover) in the background, the trailer of this movie told me that most of the movie was shot in Seoul, South Korea. Interesting! Isn’t that where that K-pop boyband from last year’s Samsung ad was from?
I got searching and the algorithm got me. In no time I was also watching the documentary Blackpink Light Up the Sky, a fresh release from the end of 2020 and my real introduction into K-pop. With the help of interviews the 5 members, Jisoo, Jennie, Rosé and Lisa, of the girlband tell the story of their early K-pop days as trainees (one of many terms in the K-pop scene), leading up to their debut (another term) in 2016 and historic moment at 2019 Coachella, where they were the first K-pop girl group to perform.
2021
As someone that studied communication and works in marketing, I think it’s quite ironic that it all started with a TV commercial. In this commercial for the Samsung Galaxy S20 (Fan Edition) the song Dynamite by K-pop band BTS is used. “A catchy tune”, I thought and that was it.
Oh… and I switched to Samsung. Mission accomplished.
2020