Korea

I thought I would drop a quick post about our whereabouts to everyone as the beaches, scuba diving, and rock climbing of Thailand were not conducive to us sitting in front of a computer to say hello to you all.

I am currently sitting in a room only lit by green and blue lights with "gamers" quickly tapping keyboards and yelling out, what I assume, are directions to their gaming friends. Internet is less than $1/hr. Welcome to Korea. After a hellish day of travel from Bangkok, through Taipei, and finally to Seoul we have made it to our trip's final point, yet we are only at its beginning.

Yesterday we learned the true meaning of frustration when we found our bags were not only over the weight limit for our airline, but also so much over the weight limit we had to pay an amount that made me cringe when I handed over my credit card. We made it from Seattle to Bangkok with no problem. Some notification from the airline that we were going to encounter this issue would have been nice. We spent a rather frustrating 30 minutes (the time we had to decide what to do with our bags) attempting to locate an address to send our over weight luggage via mail - the cheaper route. Once we had located the address we had less then 10 minutes to check in so we threw up our hands in defeat. Or at least I did. I am sure Mindy was scheming to take on China Airlines face to face, which has led her to vow to write a letter to them and complain. I feel sorry for China Airlines.

Korea: I must say that my first, yet admittedly superficial, impression of Korea is complete happiness! I am so glad the day in Bangkok was so bad because this place is so good. The people are extremely polite, yet not obsequious; the cities are very modern, clean, and organized (this is something I missed in Thailand), yet the surrounding environment seems to be incorporated into planning; the food is varied and spicy, but not four star thai. The food's spiciness is pertinent because I don't even want to talk about what is going on in our stomachs after three weeks of travel in Thailand. It is westernized, yet decidedly not. The driver picked picked us up at Incheon Airport, which was voted as the world's number one airport from 2005-2007, and driven about 40 minutes outside of Seoul to Gwangju. We were a little concerned after seeing the how nice of a central location in Seoul a fellow English teacher had after she was dropped off - "our place can't be better than this". Well, I don't know if I can say it is better and we would probably prefer to be more central for social reasons, but I can say that we were very suprised at how nice our apartment was. It is brand new, with a bedroom, an office, kitchen, bathroom, washer and dryer, and living room. Further, it is nearly fully furnished with a TV, couch, desk, bed, 2 dressers taller then I am, and radiant floor heating. It is nicer than my apartment in The Ham.

So where does that leave us? Last night we met our Co-Teachers and were introduced to some Korean food, which they fed us until we were stuffed. Mindy was a little dismayed when she found out that she was the one going to travel an hour to work everyday and I was only 25 minutes away even though we requested the reverse - I am more of a morning person and take about 20 minutes to get out the door rather than an hour. We informed them of this mix up, but they said they could not change it at this point. This morning Mindy was asked to come into work for a walk through with the teachers at 7:40am and I was asked to come in at 2:00pm. Needless to say, the disparity in sleeping time may create some resentment over tonight's dinner :-) Today I am going to attempt to locate an electricity converter and some other household items, but Mindy has the language book today and I have a feeling this task is going to be difficult.

I am going to sign off now and try to do something productive with a very large language barrier. By the way, don't expect any pictures of Thailand as I left the camera on a Tuk Tuk taxi in Phuket. Lets admit it though, the only thing we lost was a bunch of couple's pictures in different areas: us on a beach, us in a taxi, us in a bar, us with travellers, et al. We try not to think about the good ones we lost: rock climing, islands, sunsets,....shit. We will post our stories of Thailand later, but I wanted to get you all up-to-date on us.

-Scott