I know how to Korean

August 1st, 2015

I survived my first day in South Korea! I'm exhausted. Unfortunately, I lost my luggage somewhere between LAX and PVG and PUS. So I've been a stressed-out basket case all day. I may or may not have had a small breakdown when I was alone in my dorm room...and then I told myself, "Man up, [choice descriptor]! You got this!" And it really has been an awesome day overall: 

Bad things:

• I lost my luggage.

• Some food was not as palatable as I was anticipating. #KimchiMayBeAnAcquiredTaste

Dinner, clockwise from upper left: mushroom salad (they were long and chewy ... weird), salad with Asian dressing (duh), KIMCHI, beef bulgogi (really tender beef in a super salty/oniony broth), rice (duh) and seafood pancakes (the texture kind of got me...)

China Eastern's in-flight food. I ate the roll, at least...

Good things:

• China Eastern did provide this nice Tai Chi instructional video on the flight from LA to Shanghai ... very soothing ...

(They were so serious. I also enjoyed watching my fellow passengers participate along with the video...)

• I made some awesome friends already, and my favorite person so far is also going to Gangwon-do!

• My dorm room is really nice, for a dorm. The shower isn't as bad as I was expecting; it gets the whole bathroom wet, yes, but you just wear these fancy Korean shower shoes! #Fashionable

(Just ignore the part where I have cankles. 13-hour flights and running through terminals will do that to ya, apparently. Apparently ... [repeated for Josh's benefit]

• As my two friends and I were trying to hail a taxi to go to E-mart, an ajusshi (old Korean man) stopped us and started talking to us. He used to teach English to high school students. He was the kindest, cutest old man. But, wow, he talked our ears off. After about a half hour, we were finally able to hail down an unoccupied taxi and gently extricate ourselves to run our errands.

• I bought my first Korean clothes and shoes. If you were wondering, holding up granny-panty Korean underwear (the only kind they sell) to guess if it's your size draws some entertaining looks... Yay for being the stereotypical crazy American tourist. (Oh, and fyi, sizing up only increases the length of the underwear, not the waist size...)

• Korean fashion is really modest (hence, the granny panties that hit at your boobs--). But it makes it nice when buying professional clothing for our orientation.

• As we were leaving E-mart, we passed a little dessert stand (in E-mart) that was selling waffles and churros and other yummy things. For 2000 won, I bought a chocolate-filled churro. The Korean guy hollowed out the churro, filled it, and rolled it in cinnamon sugar while I watched, so it was piping hot when I got it. As he was wrapping it in a paper sleeve, he got a little bit of chocolate on the paper and made a point to throw away that wrapper and put my churro in a brand new, clean wrapper: pretty awesome customer service. My friends and I got pictures in front of the stand. The workers were all laughing and the main guy posed for us. As we were leaving the stand, he offered us each a sweet bun (maybe out of bean paste?) on the house. Koreans are so nice. (Oh, except the first taxi driver who was irritated we didn't know our Korean numbers better...)

• Oh, no sales tax at the store and no tipping! So awesome! Our 10 minute cab rides were about $4 USD. Split between three girls, it's not bad at all.

• And...after everything that has happened in the last 36 hours, I am going to sleep so soundly tonight.

See: overall, a good day in Korea. :)

And here are all the random pictures from day 1:

At the Shanghai airport. They shuttled us on the tarmac, right up to the plane. And, wow. Hello, humidity. Not in Salt Lake anymore.

My first sight in Korea. My home for the next 6 months. I almost felt like crying. Not out of sadness, but out of gratitude, maybe? Or rejoicing, kind of? It's so hard to describe.

The view from my dorm room window. Say what??!

When you're in Korea without your luggage, you buy cute towels.

You'd be surprised what excellent scissors this little door thingy makes for cutting off tags... (oh, because they confiscated my little craft scissors in Shanghai, as expected...)

My little bathroom. The shower head's not pictured, but the whole room is the shower. Everything gets wet. It takes me forever to figure out what I'm supposed to do...not because it's hard to turn the shower on, but because it's so different: "Wait, I don't have to close a door or a curtain or anything? I just turn the water on? Like, now?"

First shopping trip.

P.S. I know it's not the 1st of August. This took forever to post for the following reasons: 

1. I couldn't figure out the ethernet/WiFi situation in the dorms

2. I pretty much crashed the last couple of nights before I could upload everything

3. The Blogger page was in Korean (unfortunately, I learned that if I translated the site to English, it mistook my writing for Korean and attempted to translate my words back to English, which just made a mess of everything...time to sharpen my Hangul reading/translating skills.)

Thanks for reading if you made it this far. Love to all my family and friends back home!