Recap on Halloween week!

Hey guys! My name is Niki Patel and I originally study at Western Kentucky University in the United States. I am here in South Korea to study abroad for a semester at Yonsei University, one of the best schools in the country. In this week’s FEA blog post, I wanted to mention celebrating Halloween in South Korea as foreigners. Halloween isn’t widely celebrated throughout the whole country. It’s common in foreigner friendly cities like Hongdae and especially Itaewon. My friends and I started off by going to a Halloween parade in Seoul. It was filled with realistic looking zombies, princesses, and many children friendly characters. We ended off the night with going to Itaewon, where I made friends that night. It was so cool meeting other foreigners and Koreans because we would all exchange how we would normally celebrate back home and costume ideas for next year. Trick or treating in Korea is way different than how it is back in the United States. Trick or treating is really only for little kids and it’s only done at hagwons which are English learning schools. The good thing is that any kid is welcomed whether you attend the school or not. Another really cool thing is how the Dominos in South Korea has a Halloween pack, where it comes with Halloween themed spooky pizzas. A pizza that my housemates and I ordered was the ghost Halloween pizza. The pizza had mozzarella shaped ghosts with corn eyes and left trails of marinara sauce. The box even came with Halloween stickers to make it even more festive. A costume that I noticed that was very common throughout the whole week was players from the Squid game. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s a tv show on Netflix that blew up all over the world. The show is about a survival game that ended with a generous cash prize. There was even a pop up set at the Itaewon train station and actual workers from Netflix that played games from the show out on the streets. The tourist attraction of this week was the popular Namsan Seoul tower. The Namsan Seoul tower gives you an amazing view of the whole city. We preferred to go at night and the view with all the lights in the city looked so unreal. The good thing is that you don’t have to walk up the tower, there is a cable car that transports you from the bottom of the mountain to the base of the tower. The tower even comes with restaurants and coffee shops to make the experience even better. If you ever come to South Korea to study abroad or even just to travel, the Namsan Seoul Tower is something you wouldn’t want to miss out on.