I picked up a lot of good souvenirs on this trip. Some of them are physical objects I can display on a shelf, some are things I made myself, and some are just memories I've tried to turn into something tangible. Here's a rundown of the ones I'm most proud of.

Key Rings

As many of you know, I collect keyrings. I did my best to score a few good ones everywhere I went. By the end I bought 19 key rings in total.

Crests

I also made a small set of crests for myself — one for each personal milestone I hit along the way. Nothing official, just something I designed to mark the moments that mattered: reaching the top of Bukhansan, surviving MAMA, hitting 70 days on the road. Turning them into something I can actually pin up is still on my list, but the designs themselves already mean a lot to me.

Photoshoot

I count the pictures from my professional photoshoot as a souvenir too! Three outfits, three sides of my time here: hanbok at the palace for culture, a dress shirt in the hotel lounge for the "office," and a tourist fit in the neon-soaked alleys of Euljiro for adventure. The full edited set turned out so well I gave it its own post — read it here: Picture Day.

Vlog

I also put together a one-minute vlog of the entire trip. It's the thing I show people first when they ask how it went, and I'm still a little amazed I managed to compress 10 weeks into 60 seconds. Check it out below!

Link to the vlog.

Trinkets

I picked up trinkets on my side trips to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. I got a wooden postcard of Hokusai's masterwork, a wooden foodcart from Taiwan and a seal from Hong Kong. I built a little display stand myself out of some wood so I'd actually have somewhere to put them all.

Collage

I kept every plane ticket, museum booklet, map, receipt and odd piece of papier I could get my hands on along the way. I glued them all together into one big collage and hung it up in my room. I love how it captures the whole trip in one view. See if you can spot all the references!

Kpop wall

On the inside door of my closet I keep a collection of kpop memorabilia. These are mostly posters and album cutouts that I frame. On my trip I collected some more stuff, so rearraged everything so that I could fit it all. I added the 'Spaghetti' album, the TWICE poster that I bought on 2025-10-11, some photos from TWICE's fanmeeting. This should last me a while.

Picture Frame

I took an enormous number of pictures on this trip, and they're all posted here on the blog — but let's be honest, I don't exactly sit down and scroll through my own blog for fun. I wanted something physical to remind me of it all instead.

My first instinct was to buy a digital picture frame, but every option I found was either too bright, needed constant charging, or ran on closed-source software I couldn't touch. So I found an open-source version online and built on top of it myself: I wrote my own display code, swapped in a bigger battery, and added a Witty Pi to stretch the battery life from about 4 hours to 4 weeks.

I also designed and 3D printed a custom frame for it. The code and the frame files are both up on GitHub if you want to build your own.

Personal Growth

Above all the physical stuff, what I'll actually keep with me the longest is how much this trip changed me. I set out with a list of goals for this trip, and I hit pretty much every one of them. Finding my groove in a foreign country, getting to practice my Korean with natives, and celebrating the end of my twenties.

Those memories don't fit on a keyring, but they are the souvenir I'm proudest of.

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