There : The First Day

It’s another day here. The flight and time change lost me two days, and I’m surprised to see that it is Friday, when I left Kansas on Tuesday. My first day in Korea was great. A lot of it was eaten up by the trip from the airport to Sunlin. But once I got here, I was shown quickly to my room, they brought bedding and showed me where the bathrooms and showers were. I’m living in a dorm room with no roommates right now, but that will change.

I had my first functional test here. When I got to my room there were 3 banks of switches and a rotary style desk fan mounted to the ceiling. I flipped a few switches that didn’t seem to do anything, but I wanted to turn on the fan. One of the switches was labeled, so I decided I’d figure out what it said without turning it on. So I looked it up in my dictionary. Unfortunately, it didn’t have a close enough match to make sense. What it did have was a word that started with the same character block, but went on for several more blocks. It was windmill, so I figured that made sense. The switch had 3 positions, and one of them, I found in my dictionary, was “intense”. So I set it to intense windmill and the fan turned on. It’s a small think, but it seems like a victory.

The accommodations were nice enough, and I got about three hours to fire off my first message to my parents since leaving, take a much needed shower and lay around. That was some much needed time. Then it was off to lunch with Jared, Dr. Waters and Mr. Ha.

Jared is an ESU graduate who is over here teaching English at Sunlin. He was my contact through 90% of the trip setup. He’s a really stand up guy, and he speaks Korean fairly well. He also has a car and can seemingly navigate through Pohang without getting hit. That’s impressive.

Dr. Waters is the ESU professor who is, with Jared, doing the teaching at the English camp. I am an assistant. Dr. Waters is also a great guy, and shared the day-plus trip with me.

Mr. Ha was my other contact and the man who set up my Visa, showed me around the dorm, and drove us to Pohang.

The lunch was very nice. It was some kind of Cream-of-Potato soup, a salad which was mostly sprouts and peppers and a sweet vinegar dressing, rice with bean paste, some kind of beef thing, with mushrooms, and a sausage with mustard and purple cabbage. And Kimchi. But, of course, every meal has Kimchi. It was nice to have some good Kimchi, again.

After a pleasant lunch, we went to meet with Dr. Ahn (whom I had met at ESU before) and the President of Sunlin, Mr. Chun. It was a fun meeting, and the Koreans were very welcoming, friendly and funny. One thing I noticed was a trend towards being very complimentary and stressing past connections with us. That would make sense, from what I know of the culture.

Then we went with Jared out into the world. I’ve already talked about driving in Korea. I’m impressed at how well he did, because it seemed like we were constantly in danger of getting hit. We went to a 5 story, Walmart like place. The parking was on stories 4 and 5. It was interesting. There was a girl waving around in the parking garage saying there was no parking, try the next floor. There was parking on that floor, but it was interesting. We went down to the first floor and I was immediately struck by how many service people there were. Maybe 40 per floor. They had lots of people handing out samples of everything, people standing in the watch and clock cubby, people in the soaps and aftershaves there to let you try stuff out, people by the fish, and people by the electronics. People everywhere. Don’t mistake the description as being like Walmart associates where there are maybe 2 people per large section, with more people at specific places. Think of Walmart with someone in every aisle, and maybe 2 per aisle in electronics, groceries and anywhere else they could fit more.

They seem to have lots of service people everywhere. The small (really small) restaurant we went to for dinner had 3 waitresses for something like 10 tables. I asked Jared how they could support that many people. He said that places go out of business a lot in Korea. I’m sure they make minimum wage or so, and most were high school aged (I think, I still can’t tell ages of Asians very well), but in America, you’d have to mark up your prices a lot to compensate.

The store had an interesting layout. You took escalators between floors, but you could only get to floor 2 from floor 1, not from 3. You had to pay for whatever you got on one floor at that floor, before going to the next. Bags cost extra. I bought an umbrella that promised me “Technical Intense Joy” or something like that, and an alarm clock. It was around 2000 Won, or a bit over $20. I used my American debit card and got charged $2 in fees, which is actually pretty good, since I hear it can cost up to $7 per use. There is no sales tax, and no tipping waitresses. We went upstairs to get an electrical adapter, but couldn’t find one. It seemed very difficult to convince the sales people they existed, but there may have been a large barrier there, language wise, as even Jared was unsure how to describe it. I finally found one at another store (where 4 clerks sat me down at a table and didn’t really talk to me, as Jared tried to get a friend on the phone to describe the part in Korean).

As I alluded to before, we ate at a tiny restaurant with short, Korean style tables where you sit on the floor. That moment validated my habit of sitting weird all my life. I was born to eat on short tables. We had a big plate of noodles and chicken that was really good. It was more than Jared, Dr. Waters and I could eat. It cost $15, no tax, no tip. Eating here is quite cheap.

 

We also saw Jared’s apartment. It was bigger and nicer than I expected, even though the building was painted a bit how I imagine a Soviet Era apartment complex would be painted. Jared said that a similar apartment in Seoul would cost around 5 times more. It had two rooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen that went into a somewhat separate living room. It was probably as nice as any apartment I’ve lived in.

 

That was pretty much it, though. We went home, settled down, and I slept from 9 PM to 7 AM. It was a great day.