I Got Seoul

I'm awake at 5:30am on a Saturday so I thought I would write.

I arrived Wednesday night around 5pm into Incheon Airport. wow. That has to be the most efficient, high tech, beautiful airport I've ever encountered. We stepped out of the plane and they immediately took our temperature. Make sure we don't have swine flu! Then we walk through another gate with a man looking at us for symptoms of Swine flu, oh sorry H1N1. Gotta be pc. Huge HD Samsung flatscreens telling us which lines are for foreigners and SK passport holders. I walk over to the escalator that leads me to the baggage claim and it's activated by walking through sensors. Energy efficient ya'll-what what.

I walked outside to the bus stop, after taking advantage of the free wifi at the airport, in order to catch the one going to City Air.

I totally fell asleep on the bus even though I knew I wanted to stay awake and fend off jetlag. I get to City Air and contact Grace to let her know I arrived. She tells me I need to take the black and red cab to Hyundai Residences. We drive through the nighttime skyline of Seoul. It reminds me of Vegas, New York and San Francisco and at the same time is like nothing I've ever seen. Each of the multitude of bridges is lit up a different way and with different colors. So pretty. So many skyscrapers. I'm really here!

After arriving I find out I have a roommate. Her name is Holly and she's awesome! She's from Texas and adopted Korean so she's catching a lot of slack for looking Korean and not speaking. Oh assumptions. We both decide it's food time so we head out to find somewhere to eat. We run into a chicken place where we decide to stop. Here is how our first interaction goes:

walk past the patio seating into the restaurant

Man working: speaks korean

Us: Hi, can we have a menu please?

MW: Menu?

Us: Yeah, making a menu shape with our fingers in the air, Menu?

We stand at the counter and choose Spices Chicken. Yes, Spices. Noticing the man had disappeared we ask the woman behind the grill if we can have the spices chicken. Well, not so much ask as point to the menu.

We choose our drink from the glass refrigerator and see the man back at the counter. He takes our drinks and sets them on a tray. He shows us the total and after paying go outside to the patio where everybody else is sitting.

He brings out a plastic bag.

We ordered it to go apparently. We wanted to sit and eat :( So here we are. Americans to the fullest. While everyone else has utensils and plates, we throw our bones into the plastic bag and use napkins as our plates. Not a big deal if the wings were dry, but ours had this yummy thick sauce all over it. Awesome.

We decide to walk to some buildings a few blocks away that were lit up with huge screens on them...

we stumble upon retail heaven.

Department store after department store with stages and music playing outside. Crazy tall buildings with nothing but shopping inside! Vendors outside selling even more and food. We found out these stores don't close until 5:30am. NYC as the city that never sleeps is a misnomer. Seoul deserves that title.

We arrive home around 12:30am and just as we settle in, we get a call. It's Jennifer from Chungdahm and she has our thermometers for us. In order to begin training, we have to take our temperatures twice a day, at 10am and 5pm and email the results to Tawei. These thermometers are old school mercury ones in Celsius. I don't know if it was the metric system, the disorientation we felt from being in another country, or because we were tired and delusional, but we couldn't figure out how to read it for the life of us. Finally Holly figures it out and it's so obvious that I won't even tell you what it was.

Thursday morning we wake up to breakfast. MMM. Our employer pays for breakfast each morning. Quite the spread. Juices, coffee, milk and water of course. Three kinds of cereal, two types of kimchi, toast, croissants, different rolls, fresh fruit and salad on one table. One the other we have scrambled eggs, pancakes, broccoli with potatoes, a korean mushroom dish, rice, egg drop soup and juk. Oh yummy yummy.

It's thunder storming like a mother outside, so we kick it in our room until we leave to our medical appointment at 2pm. A taxi picks us up and takes us to another example of Korean efficiency. This health center is like an assembly line for David, Holly and I.

standby. I need to leave and I'll finish this later :)