Westlake High School students who spent the last three weeks studying at the Bugil Academy in Chungnum-do, South Korea returned to their home campus Monday, tired but excited from their journey. With them, they brought 11 Korean high school students from their partner school. The visitors will now spend three weeks studying in classes at Westlake and living with host families in the Eanes school district area.

“Our students were able to interact with people from a different culture, which showed them that there are some differences, but, although half way around the world, Korean teenagers are basically the same as American teenagers,” said Allegra Hobbs, the Westlake AP calculus teacher who traveled to Korea with the students. “They also tried many new foods and visited a number of Korean landmarks.”

Westlake juniors Hailey Thompson and Sean Brocklehurst were part of the group of students to travel to South Korea, the first group of local high school students to take part in the new exchange program. They earned the privilege of visiting the foreign high school with Hobbs by writing an essay about how they thought they could benefit from the trip. They stayed in the Global Leadership Program campus, which houses approximately 40 Korean boarding students, all of whom speak English and plan on attending U.S. universities. Both Thompson and Brocklehurst said they were surprised by the ease with which they could communicate with their Korean counterparts and the welcoming and supportive environment they found at the GLP campus.

“It was basically a big home school with 40 kids in it,” Brocklehurst said.

He said he was intrigued by how centralized the cities he visited in Korea were, and how vertically well designed they were.

“In a building, you have a department store, then the floor below is a grocery store and the floor below that is a bus station,” he said.

Thompson said the trip has given her more confidence, confidence she said will come in handy as she heads off to college in two years.

“I am more comfortable communicating with people,” she said. “And I think I have a better feel for how foreign visitors feel when they come here. It’s harder for them though, because hardly anyone in this country speaks other languages fluently.”

Both Brocklehurst and Thompson said one of the strangest cultural differences in Korea was the societal focus on shoes and rules about shoes. They said they had to remove their shoes any time they entered a room. To make the process easier, many Koreans, even professionals, often go about their days clad in slippers.

“You see all these people in really nice tailored, expensive suits, and they have bunny slippers on their feet,” Brocklehurst said.

Both Westlake students have already set up links with their new friends in Asia through Facebook and other social networks. They plan to stay in touch. Thompson, who is thinking of studying forensic psychology in college, said the travel experience made her realize she would like to study abroad for part of her university years. Brocklehurst, who plans on studying engineering after high school graduation, said he probably will not study abroad, but he now realizes he would like to make sure travel becomes a regular part of his life in the future.

“I feel like people who didn’t try to join this exchange program don’t have any idea what they missed,” Thompson said. “Everyone asks me what it was like, and all I can say is that it was amazing. I just don’t know how else to describe it.”