The K-Pop Heroes: Rachel & Jay

Rachel has known Jay their entire life, as they initially met at a family reunion when Jay was a baby. As Jay grew up time passed, they didn’t see each other very often, due to life getting in the way, since Rachel is about 10 years older than Jay. One day when Jay was about 13, and Rachel was in her early 20 Jay’s father heard that Jay was into K-Pop and wanted to know if anyone knew anything about it. Rachel’s father reached out to her, and directed her to Mark’s message. Rachel replied, and now the rest is history.

Although Rachel and Jay live on opposite sides of the United States, as Rachel is in Pennsylvania and Jay is in California, the pair do their best to make travel plans together for “family bonding sessions” and go to places such as Canada, Los Angeles, and Hawaii. On many of these trips, they go to see concerts for groups like BTS and GOT7.

About Rachel

My name is Rachel and I am a K-Pop-aholic in Pittsburgh, PA. If they had some sort of Anonymous group for K-Pop and Korean culture I would be such an active member of the group that I could be deemed its mascot, as I have yet to find something Korea related that I truly dislike. As for the birth of my Korea obsession, you can read more about it here. The general gist: It’s awesome.

As for my personal life, I graduated from Bucknell University in 2015 with a dual degree in French and International Relations, and now work for an international tech company as a client manager (I originally started there as a French speaker, doing translation), and spend at least half of my day listening to K-Pop and dancing in my chair while cursing in multiple languages over everything being broken. Nowadays, I occasionally get to do some work in Korean, as it is now well known that “Rachel can read that”. Before all of that,I was a classical musician for over 10 years (piano, violin, and vocals) as well as being involved in musical theater, multiple choirs, and dance.  My favorite style of music is Jazz and R&B.

Some of Rachel’s Favorite Groups:

  • EXO
  • Super Junior
  • GOT7
  • Seventeen
  • Monsta X
  • Red Velvet
  • BTS
  • SHINee
  • TWICE
  • NCT
  • iKON
  • EXID

About Jay

My name is Jayden and I am slowly being pulled into insanity by Rachel. I’m not quite as engrossed in it as Rachel but as time goes on but I am slowly falling deeper and deeper into that rabbit hole.

I live in California as a sophomore in high school and I have three cats which means I’m busy all the time with work or using a lint roller to get cat hair off me. Aside from Korean lessons or producing various videos, I work in stage crew and have a theater kid complex the size of east Texas. I’m also non binary though I’m slowly fading into more masculine ways of expressing myself which has presented me with a fun journey that I am navigating true to the teenage style: horribly. I’m also in the process of arranging to take six months off from school to do language immersion in Korea which should turn out to be its own sub category on this blog very soon!

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