A Brave New World

Extra note: I am currently typing my blog on my HP Touchpad using the virtual keyboard. It has no spell check and often I hit the wrong letter without noticing. I forgot to run this post through MS Word before I put it up. It is fixed now and I'll try not to forget next time! On with my story....

After having arrived at the terminal we were shocked as to how normal everything looked. It was as if we could be anywhere in middle America. The first real sign that we were in a brave new world was the sign, in Korean and English, welcoming us to Korea. We proceeded forward following the signs, marked again in English and Korean, for baggage claims. We stopped for a moment to fill out our customs forms before we stood to be allowed in the country. The nice man behind the counter takes your papers, asks you to scan your pointer finger, look into a camera, and then stamps your visa. All very quick....kinda like how fast the FBI will be receiving they information I’m sure.

We were officially in a foreign country! My first time ever leaving good old America. We continued to follow the baggage signs ended up at a train platform loaded with people. We all boarded and were whisked away to the main terminal. Our first introduction to the Eastern way of things (no nickel and diming) was the luggage cart. They were free! No rental, no payment, just grab one. We loaded it down with our luggage and chugged away. That sentence makes it seem easier than it was. Catherine had the best idea on how to stack them and use a bungee cord to keep them together (brilliant thought of her to bring those as well). Unfortunately it was so overloaded that I couldn’t steer from the back. Catherine had to guide the front as I pushed and this had the tendency to destabilize the cart. Our tea work got the job done.

We asked a nice lady how to get to JeonJu and she directed us to the bus ticket counter and gave us written Korean instructions. We bought our tickets and Catherine called our fellow teacher to let her know when we would arrive. We went outside to find our bus and met our bus driver. Unlike America where they are usually nice and helpful, this man just seemed irritated that anyone was on the bus at all. After putting our luggage under the bus we boarded and found only 2 other passengers. So, not knowing any better, we plopped down on a couple of seats and got comfortable. A few minutes later a gaggle of girls came aboard, stood next to us, and started speaking in Korean. Turns out the bus had assigned seats and we were sitting in theirs. We got up and moved so they, naturally, sat in the back nowhere near their seats!

The bus driver finally got on and our journey into Korea began. First thing to note is there was still no Wi-Fi available. We did have however, a nice sized TV to watch! Then we realized it was all native Korean shows with no subtitles. They were showing some type of 'America’s got talent/American idol' program that is recognizable but very foreign at the same time. Shots of the judges had their heads exaggerated, cartoon colored, and enlarged. They also do this to the acts throughout their performance....how strange! Later during the ride we would watch what seemed to be a very popular nighttime drama. I say it seemed popular because the girls in the back were watching the same show on their phones.....I know this because we kept hearing double. First from the back, then from the front. After awhile it wears on you!

Throughout the early part of the drive, when it was still light out, we were looking at everything. We saw cell phone towers poorly disguised as trees....check those pictures out on Catherine's blog. We didn't get a chance to see Seoul proper unfortunately but that will come soon enough. The bus stopped at the other airport for Seoul, Gimpo International, to pick up a couple of passengers before heading straight to Jeonju. As the sun began to set Catherine and I both took naps to recharge our batteries from the shock of landing in a brand new country.

We were jolted awake as the bus came to a stopped at a rest station. By the time we realized what happened the bus had cleared out and we were effectively alone. We hurried off and out to the station as Catherine asked me how long we had to eat. I had read that we have a half hour stop during the trip so I relayed the information. We walked in to what was, in reality, a cafeteria. Normally, this would be fine. Unfortunately everything, and I do mean everything, was in Korean. We stood staring at the pictures distributed on the ceiling trying to decide what to order. After a while I just walked up to the lady at the register, pointed at a Hangul (written Korean) sign, and played Korean Roulette.

We got our dishes and I dove into my noodle soup dish. It had a weird texture but was alright tasting as a devoured it. First surprise on the food front was the weird shaped chopsticks. Having practiced, semi-extensively, with the chopsticks from home I felt prepared to hold my own. But square, wooden shaped chopsticks have a whole different fell than the thin, flat, metal ones they handed me. I managed to do alright and went to grab two bottles of water for Catherine and I. They had a little convenience store inside the station that I located and then searched for bottled water. I bought the cheapest one available, 800Won per half liter, and brought them back. Catherine had gotten used to her food, she had a little more difficulty with the chopsticks but a nice lady helped her out by bringing a fork :-) Not long after I got back the counter lady came up to us and was attempting to tell us something. While we were trying to bridge the language barrier our driver came up in an angry, irritated, urgent rush to demand we get back on our bus.

As we piled back on it didn't seem that the other passengers cared much that we had run late but the driver was in his own little pissed off world. The ride began again and we both went back to sleep. I came awake as we were about 15 minutes from our destination and watched as we passed thru our new city. The first thing to note about Jeonju, Korean in general really, is the pervasiveness of bright, neon signs. It was late night and the signs were everywhere even though half the businesses seemed closed. Soon enough I woke Catherine up and we prepared to get off the bus. As the bus stopped we all got up and started to unload ourselves and our baggage.

For a moment we stood around because we didn't know where to go or where our ride was. Then two girls came up and introduced themselves as Liz and Marsha. Liz is our fellow teacher at the school and Marsha was her friend who came by to help out. We hailed two taxis because there was no way all of our luggage would fit in one along with all four of us. Turns out the taxis run on natural gas so they have half the space you expect. That left Marsha with a cab full of luggage and headed towards our new home. We got in the other taxi with Liz.

She introduced us to herself and let us know a little about the city. Liz is from South Africa and this is her fourth year teaching English in Korea. She only started at our school 6 weeks ago though. As we passed thru sections of our city she told us a little bit about the notable ones. Soon enough tho we had arrived at our brand new home. We worked together to bring our baggage up 3 flights of stairs (once again I have moved somewhere with no elevator) to our apartments. We got the quick tour of our studio like rooms, made plans to meet up the next day, and said goodnight.

First plan? Get on the internet and let our families know we were ok. First failure? To get on the internet. For whatever reason, the internet setup here (only an ethernet cable to a wall jack) doesn’t like Macs. I think this is because Apple is suing Samsung over everything, everywhere. So, no matter what I did, we had no internet. Second plan? Use our new phone, old small LG smartphones, to get on Yahoo and send an email. Second failure? To get Yahoo to be in English! Turns out that every major site determines where you are and picks their local server/site so we kept getting sent to yahoo.co.kr :-( Next we played the guessing game. Navigate based on memory and context clues.

With this plan we got to Catherine's inbox but the layout was different than it had been on her American phone. So with no idea what the 'compose' button was we went in search of a email to reply to. We found one quickly but were presented with a similar problem. Which of the three top buttons was reply? My suggestion, the middle one, was based off the idea that it couldn't possibly be the delete button. Catherine pressed it and presto: the email was deleted. :-( Catherine immediately stopped taking my advice and selected the correct button. She wrote a short email to her family and went to send it. Again we had a problem. What was the send button? Because of my previous error Catherine choose first this time. Luckily it was the save draft button. Could've been much worse! Her next choice was send and our troubles were over. I wrote an email to my family and sent it thus finally ending our long journey into a brave new world.

P.S. Sorry I'm so behind. I hope to get our first week in Korea up by the end of this week. Our second will come sometime next week is everything goes well!

Chasing the Sun

We have arrived. Our journey has ended and yet just begun. It began with a night of frantic packing to get everything together and in 4 checked bags weighing less than 50 pounds. It ended with a cab ride to our new apartments in north Jeonju, Korea. The story, however, is more complex than that. I'm still not sure how i feel about it all....somewhere in between nervous, scared, and excited. This is a strange new place. The locals don't speak English as well as we hoped and were led to believe. First plan: learn Korean.

We didn't finish packing until 2 in the morning. Less than 2 hours later we were in the car riding to the airport. Thankfully Catherine's parents put together a nice breakfast to get us on our way. We were late leaving the house (as usual) but made it with plenty of time to spare. All our hard work the night before paid off as all our bags came in under weight. One did give me a bit of a scare as it shifted from 50 to 51 but the guy from US Airways stepped on the scale to reset it and didn't hesitate to take the bag off the moment it stopped at 50.

We said our goodbyes to Catherine's family and headed through security. I got my second exposure to electronic raping.....still not a fan of the invasion of privacy. Whatever happened to needing a warrant to search someone? I digress, we boarded our nice 737 for the flight to Charlotte where we sat at the rear of the plane. Luckily we managed to get both our backpacks and carry-on bags in the upper storage. I don't think our backpacks could've made it under the seats. I sat in the middle seat and allowed Catherine the aisle seat to help with her claustrophobia. That left me between sleeping passengers for the flight as I was timing my sleep to coincide with nighttime in Korea. The guy in front of me decided he wanted to sleep as well so i got my legs pinched behind his recline the whole flight :-( That really pissed me off, I never recline on planes because the cramped quarters are bad enough to begin with! I fiddled around for a bit and finally decided to start reading "The Prince" by Machiavelli. We landed in short order and disembarked in Charlotte.

There Catherine bought us a couple bottles of water, we found our next gate, and sat down to wait. Catherine slept, her plan (suggested by her doctor) was to sleep the time difference away, while I got out her computer and read the news. I think she had the right idea! This time our plane was an Airbus 321, the first European jet I've ever flown on, a decent sized plane. This time we got bulkhead seats. I liked them as I got quite a bit of extra leg room as compared to the last leg and nobody to squish me. Strangely this flight had no in flight entertainment either....I thought they were standard on intercontinental flights. This leg I decided to get some sleep and proceeded to get about 4 hours in several small spurts. Catherine spotted the Golden Gate off in the distance and pointed it out to me! We sat next to a nice gentleman for the flight. Turns out we had the arena league football team New Orleans Voodoo on board and we were seated next to their coach. Didn't realize that till the end though, oh well.

San Francisco has a horrible airport. The design seems new and modern but lacks some basic amenities such as an easy way to get from one terminal to another. The lady at US Airways told us that there was a United shuttle a short walk away so we went there. We asked to be taken to the international terminal and she needed to know our gate. Unfortunately our tickets didn't have this information and the television screens only showed the flight for the terminal we were in....useless! She suggested we ask the nearby United attendants to look up our gate. They told us no because it was not a United flight and we were mot allowed to use their shuttle anyway. Assholes. We went back and told the lady to take us to "international" and she did this time. After getting off the shuttle we were again confused. No nearby monitor to inform is as to our gate....stupid airport! We asked the guy manning the shuttle desk and he gave us two different answers to the same question. Literally said we were in the wrong place and then told us we were right where we needed to be! We finally found our gate though.

When we got there however we were told that the flight was packed and therefore only one carry-on was allowed on board, the other would have to be checked. The kicker: the one we could take must weigh less that 7 kilos! Mine weighed nearly double that! The only way we had gotten the checked bags under weight was thru Catherine's packing skills. We, by that I mean she :), rearranged until all the heavy items were in our backpacks and carry-ons. Thank god we had expanding bags. Side note: thank you Mom for the awesome Goodwill find, we would've been screwed something fierce with my original carry-on bag! After shoving all our high weight items in bags we proceeded to hand them off to be checked. We left out our computers so we could use the Internet on our 11 hour flight. That turned out to be useless as, unlike many sources informed me, there was no Internet on our plane.

Singapore Airlines was in the process of installing it on their aircraft and ours hadn't received it yet :-( This was heartbreaking for Catherine as she had promised her mother that they would skype during the flight. Once we realized this wouldn't be possible we searched for alternatives. It turned out that the plane did have the ability to make phone calls (at an exorbitant rate) so we attempted to make a short call to Catherine's parents.

Our attempts to ease their minds failed at every turn. First we were presented with a screen requiring a country code. Having never called from outside the US we had no idea what it was. We asked the gentleman next to us and he suggested 01 or 001 but neither worked. Next we asked a flight attendant who had absolutely no idea....I guess no one ever tries to use the phones! He did find us a nice stewardess who did know the code. We plugged it in, dialed the number, and got nothing. Some statement about 'normal call clearing' and disconnecting. We tried this several times throughout the flight but were never successful. :-( Moral of the story? Never try and use an airplane phone, it's just not worth the effort!

The 777 did have some rather nifty features though. We each had a personal 10 inch screen with a large selection of movies, TV shows, learning materials, and so on. The most interesting features, to me at least, was a program called flight data or something like that. It showed you the speed, altitude, distance traveled, distance left to travel, estimated time of arrival, and a neat map showing you where the plane was located. Every time i read my book, went to sleep, or just didn't use the screen i would put this on. Such a clever little idea! I spent not a small amount of time on this screen. I watched as our plane crossed the world via Alaska and Russia, chasing the sun all the while.

Catherine dove right into the learning programs. She taught herself the Korean numbering system! I attempted to learn the days of the week and months but soon gave up because our food arrived. We were both quite hungry as we had been sustained by snacks up to this point. It was exactly what you would expect, edible but not great food. Afterwards I took a short nap (not too long because it was nearly sun up in Korea) to re-energize. When I woke I just tried to keep myself busy. I read some, tried to watch a few movies (i don't think i finished one....) and in general stay entertained.

After a marathon flight we finally got over the Korean peninsula. I watched as a most unusual sight took over. A very strangely mountainous landmass appeared. Having seen other mountainous areas from a plane i can definitely say Korea is a whole different ballgame. I saw cities and towns, plains filled with farms (rice paddies I assume), golf courses dotted everywhere, and rivers galore. I kept a lookout for Seoul but soon realized we wouldn't see it from the air :-( Our plane was coming from the east and had to circle south of Seoul to reach the Incheon airport. Unfortunately that put us on the wrong side of the plane. Guess we'll have to find another opportunity!

We were almost the last people to leave the plane. We had been seated in the rear and waited so as to collect our stuff in peace. We put our coats on (a strange sight we must have been with heavy winter coats in the middle of summer!) and walked on to a strange new world. We made it to Korea at last!