What?

I just finished my first day of teaching here in Seoul and finally have a chance to use a computer. I'm a little tired so this might be a bit more brief than you deserve. Whew.

The flight was 12 hours from Vancouver to Seoul for those that wanted to know. They played 4 movies and various other crap. The flight was tollerable thanks to a nice Korean girl sitting next to me throughout the flight. She had just spent a term at UBC doing Design IT stuff and her English was excellent. Who would think that you can transfer credits between American and Korean schools? Anyway, she had her laptop so we looked at each others pictures. The pictures from my going away party are on my flickr site linked in the right nav ->. She also showed me some videos she made as an assignment. Cool stuff.

Anyway I arrived in Seoul and met up with Craig. There's more to the story but it's too embarassing to go into detail. There is no snow here yet it's very cold. Craig took me to my new apartment which I will post pictures of soon. It's really just one room with a bed, minimal kitchen, and a TV. The bathrooms here are weird. The the bathroom is a large shower, meaning the whole bathroom is covered in tiles and theres a shower head on the wall. People generally have bathroom shoes (flip flops) to wear if you need to use the bathroom before all the water can drain and the floor is wet. The floor, now there's a funny story.

When Craig brought me to my apartment he didn't know how to work the heat so I was left to figure that out myself, but that doesn't happen until much much later in this story. After we dumped all my stuff at the apartment we went to Craig's place. It's about the same size but he has a proper bedroom and lots of nice things that I have yet to get like sheets, pots and pans, food, cable, cutlery, you know... things besides furniture. For the record there is one english channel here. It's called AFN which stands for the Armed Forces Network. There's a large number of American soldiers here and they have a massive complex near the area of town where foreigners like to hang out/live. That's where Craig took me saturday night.

We took the subway, then a bus to get there. The public transportation here is really cool. You buy a t-money card and fill it with money. When you enter the subway or a bus you scan your card and your do the same when you leave and based on how far your travel they deduct an amount from your card balance. The card can be swiped while in your wallet or purse. It wasn't until I took the subway that I realized the people in Korea aren't very small. They seem to be shorter than Canadians but on average only by a couple inches. I've seen lots of people close to my size but few that are bigger.

So I met a bunch of foreigners and partied it as long as I could but I had been awake for over 24 hours. I wanted to wait until Craig would go home because I had no idea where I was and wanted to go but he wrote down something to say to a taxi driver and told me how to find my apartment. I was reluctant but was forced to try to go home by a need for sleep. The subway stops at 11 on saturdays so I had to take a taxi. I took a 30 minute taxi ride to an intersection close to my pad and made my way home. Taxi's here are wicked cheap... that 30 minute ride was about 15$ canadian.

When I finally got in my place I fiddled with the heat panel and cranked it up all the way hoping for the best. I didn't bother with unpacking and left all my stuff on the floor and unrolled my sleeping bag and passed out instantly on my bed, which is long enough. When I woke up the apartment was very hot. Yay I have heat! When I set my feet on the floor I discovered that in Seoul heating is done in the floor. I could barely walk on the floor it was so hot! And it was even hotter with the tiles in the bathroom and I needed the go the the bathroom so bad. I figured out I could sit on the toilet with my feet off the ground so it all worked out. Ha! Funny stuff.

I'll write more later about the culture here but I have to go meet Craig for dinner now. Laters.