Chungnam Friends : Aksu Aktoprak from Azerbaijan

 Hello! My name is Aksu Aktoprak.

 I am 15 years old and from Baku, the capital city of Azerbaijan.

I love studying and learning new things. My favorite subjects are Math, ICT, Languages, and of course, Geography. I can speak Azerbaijani, Spanish, French, Russian, and English .

It may sound funny, but my name is directly connected to Geography. “Ak” means “White” and “Su” means “Water.” There are places named Aksu in several countries: a town and river in Azerbaijan, streams and towns in Turkey, the famous Aksu River Canyon in Kazakhstan, and Aksu Prefecture and city in China.

During summer, I do volunteer work. I first started at a summer camp in Geneva, Switzerland. Later, I volunteered in Baku with my sister at a summer school. Last year, I spent a month volunteering at Port Moresby Paradise International School in Papua New Guinea.

This summer, I’ve been living in Central Asia, in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. I volunteered at the Archery Grand Prix and also helped at the World Boxing Cup hosted in Astana. There were teams from many countries, including South Korea. I learned that archery and boxing are really popular sports in Korea, and they have many talented athletes like Kang Sukyung from the boxing team and Sungho Choi from the Korean archery team.

Besides volunteering, I have many other hobbies. One of them is music. I graduated from music school and play two instruments: the guitar and the piano. I also love listening to music—R&B, jazz, classical, and K-pop (AKMU, Wave to Earth, Enhypen, Seventeen,TXT, i-dle, and more).

This connects to another passion of mine—dancing. I’ve been dancing since I was 4 years old. I started with ballet and ballroom dances like cha-cha-cha, samba, and waltz, and later switched to hip-hop and K-pop dance styles.

It was pure luck, just incredible, when my mother met a professor from Korea at the UK Geographical Association Conference in Oxford, UK.

Thanks to Professor Kimeje, I became a member of your group and now have the chance to participate in such an interesting event.

I am happy to make new friends and meet people from around the world.

 I am truly interested in learning new things.

I set goals for myself and always do my best to achieve them—and when I reach those goals, it makes me so happy.

I hope one day I can host my new friends in Azerbaijan. I would love to show them the many amazing places in Baku and other beautiful regions of my country.