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Day 1 in Korea
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I'm here! Ok, so after about 48 hours of travel (El Paso to Phoenix, Phoenix to San Francisco, San Fran. to Seoul) I finally got off of the Asiana airlines flight at the Incheon International Airport. From there I had to get through customs, which was probably the easiest customs I've ever had to clear, get my bags and make my way to my hotel in Seoul. This was really uneventful, so I'm not going to dwell on it. I found the right bus on the first try, and hooked up with another CDI teacher and her sister. We got to the hotel ok and I was passed out by 9:30p when my roommate showed up.
The passing out was great, but it only lasted until about 2:00am when I got up to use the restroom and found out that Korea truly is a very high tech country. We have a fully electronic temperature controlled bodai in our bathroom. (see picture). When I came back to bed my roommate Jessica was also awake and neither of us could sleep. We shared pictures and backgrounds and Skyped some of our family and friends until about 6am when we went to get breakfast. When we were in the elevator we saw the sign for the gym and spa. One thing led to another and we decided we wanted to sit in the sauna. If you don't know, Korea is famous for its community bath houses. We asked the woman at the spa and she kept saying shower, shower, and pointing to the big bathing room which was full of naked Korean women. We decided to embrace the culture, so after purchasing our lockers, we slipped off the skivies and joined the others. Jessica was riddiculed by an old Korean woman for keeping her towel on, but by the end of our dip we were both strutting our stuff proudly. It was actually an incredibly relaxing experience and we came out feeling cleaner than we have in a long time. You just sit in the different tubs and then go scrub, get back in, and go scrub some more. We sat in a dry sauna, a wet sauna and a meditation sauna. All that for the bargain price of 6,000 Wan.
After we dried up and got ready for the day we met up with Natasha and Andrea, who are also teachers in training. We decided to walk around Seoul for a while and get some breakfast. I had a great omlet sandwich with carrots, celery, shallots, sweet ketchup and mustard. I was proud because I didn't have any idea what was in it when I bought it. We also tried a couple of noodle and meat dishes from street vendors that were ok. I decided I needed some coffee when we were about 2 hours into our walk around town but couldn't find a coffee shop, so I finally bought a can out of a vending machine. Thinking it would be cold, I just grabbed the can when it fell down, but it was hot enough to almost burn my hand. So I had my first hot can of vending machine coffee.
There were a lot of other crazy things that happened to us today, but if I try to write it all down it might take a week. We went to a presbyterian church but it was in session, so we didn't want to disturb, we checked out some cool architecture, went to a wedding expo and looked at beautiful gowns, we stopped at a snowboarding shop and talked about the skiing in the area (I'm totally going to Japan), we stopped at a veterinarian office to play with a cute little puppy in the window, and were chased through the subway shopping area by a crazy guy with hair dye running down the sides of his face. The people here are so nice but not that many speak English. When you ask them they smile and say "yae, yae" but after you finish their question they still just smile and say "yae" again. I've got to learn more Korean. I'm pretty sure at some point in this journey I will find out how many faux pauxs we made today, but I'm sure we were forgiven. Its 10:40 pm Saturday at home right now but only 2:40pm Sunday here. I'm not going to sleep until bed time so I can beat this jetlag. Komapsumnida (thank you) for reading.
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