Flying in...

We are here. It's funny how such a small statement can mean so much but at the same time not really sink in. We left Toronto at 10:00 AM on Friday morning and arrived at 12 noon on Saturday. I thought I was being smart by staying awake all night on Thursday night to try and acclimate to the time change in advance, but I didn't count on that there would be no sleep on the plane. I've been coming down with a bit of a cough over the past week or so and it managed to keep me more or less awake at nights the past few days. I'm hoping Kay doesn't come down with it (and I'm hoping a class of Korean students won't come down with it either).

The flight was pretty good other than that. They fed us well (3 meals + the occasional walkthrough with beverages), and there was actually a small LCD touchscreen in front of each person (on the back of the preceding seat) where you could choose from a variety of semi-recent movies, classics, TV shows, or radio/music selections. I guess on a 13 hour flight there's a lot of time when you can't sleep to put in a movie. I ended up finally seeing Prince Caspian (and rewatched Iron Man). We sat next to a guy named Nathan who was heading back for his second year of teaching. He seemed to be of Korean-Canadian background and knew a fair bit. When we got to the airport we all stuck together through luggage, customs, etc. Getting off the plane was pretty easy. We did have about an hour wait on luggage though... it was lucky that the plane got in 45 minutes early.

We managed to rendezvous with the head of the kindergarten program, Jasmine (Jung Wha) Choi. She helped us pack up all our luggage and then spent the rest of the day driving us around helping us to meet our needs for our first day. It was a really long drive through Seoul to Bundang. Apparently Saturday is really hectic with all the traffic. I think it was about 3 hours (maybe 3 and a half) to get to our first stop... E-Mart. It's kind of like a Korean K-Mart /Walmartish store though with more.

We stopped for lunch first in the food court in the basement. It was interesting to walk in and realize if we were there alone we wouldn't have *any* idea what was there beyond pictures. Jasmine helped guide us a bit and I ended up with some sort of beef dish (I think it was pronounced something like 'plu' 'gon' 'gi') and Kay and Jasmine each had a vegetable rice plate. Both meals were very large, with the main platter and a series of small sides. Mine had lettuce, greenish peppers, kimchi, some sort of seafoodish sauce, steamed rich, spiced cucumbers and a couple other sauces. Also it had something Jasmine said was similar to Miso soup with tofu and vegetables. Kay's was a rice vegetable dish with a spicy sauce and a number of side dishes. There was also kimchi and spiced cucumbers with hers, as well as a couple soups (one was bean sprout, another was a cold cucumber tomato soup. I think she found hers a bit too spicy so shared some of mine and I tried some of hers.

After the meal, we picked up a few miscellaneous odds and ends we would need: towels, an alarm clock, some shampoo (which turned out to be actually conditioner... not so good when we intended to use it as soap/body wash as well). and food. Things were marvellously expensive so we'll have to take some time to look around and find out what the best options for food and such are while we're here. So far we found eggs were reasonably priced. Large loaves of white bread seem to be OK, and everything else seemed pretty pricy. We managed to get a 5 lb bag of rice for about $15. Eggs were similar in price or at least not mind bogglingly expensive so we went with just rice, eggs and bread. Water too... people don't drink the tapwater so we stocked up on water which is relatively cheap.

At this point, Jasmine was running late for a meeting with the pastor of the church that runs the school, so we went there to find he had already left. Other than that we pretty much came back here to the apartment and unloaded at about 8PM our time.

The apartment is very nice. It's a bit smaller than others I've lived in, but it's by no means cramped. It's very open and modern: it has an air conditioner with remote control for temperature settings, there's a video intercom for the door, the lock is a keypad, there are motion lights in the entry for when you come in... it's also very clean and nice looking. We'll try to get pictures of it soon.

We didn't last very long after all that, it was pretty much a case of 'oohing' over the apartment, washing off what seemed like a long couple of days of travel grime and then going to bed.