Day 1 - My first glimpse at Seoul, South Korea! (June 29, 2010)

I wrote most of this on June 29, 2010 – the day I arrived Seoul, South Korea. However I was too lazy to post it up.

FINALLY! After counting down for days we are here! (by we I mean my chingu (friend) Anne and ME!)

Well. first impression? I remember I kept jumping up and down and saying every few seconds to my chingu "We're in KOREA! OH MY PEE WE ARE IN KOREA!" But other than that I was really too tired to appreciate or look at anything. Once we got home we were served fruit, given lunch and then crashed to sleep. An interesting thing is that none of the rooms have beds (NO they are not vampires. If you read twilight you’ll know what I am talking about). Oh oh the food was cool! We had rice and this Korean soup with tofu and kimchi and maaaany side dishes.

In the few hours I’ve been in Korea I’ve learnt that acting is really important. The mother’s English level isn’t high and therefore she can’t really understand what we say. And since we are only a few hours old in Korea, our Korean level isn’t exactly conversation type either. So we try to catch the few Korean words we understand when they speak to us, and they catch on the few English words they know and then we play charades from there.

So after I woke up I met the brother who had just come from school. He’s really sweet. He speaks the best English in the house so he translated what his mother was saying to us. But he is VERY busy. He gets up in the morning, goes to school then comes back around 4ish. Then he eats, rests for a bit and then goes to this academy type of thing. It is kinda like cram school, where you learn more. He comes back at around 10pm. He eats and then starts on his homework and sleeps reeeeally late. Then a few hours later he wakes up and his day starts again.

I will try to never again complain about my school life. Really. IB is a breeze compared to what he seems to go through.

The father came home around 7ish I think. And and he got us this basket of flowers which had a ribbon that said “Welcome to Korea.” We were really happy! (^-^)

The whole family is really really really nice. We are SO lucky to get such a wonderful family.

Oh it seems that after every meal, or after almost every meal they eat fruit. I had fruits about 4 times today. I usually stay away from fruits xD

One strange thing – there are NO sinks. None of the bathrooms have a sink. (We have our own bathroom with just a toilet in our room and then there is a main bathroom with a toilet and shower area in another area of the house). Instead of a sink, there is this tap type of thing where the water falls to the floor of the bathroom. Of course there is drainage at the floor so the water goes down. But because of this the bathroom is aaaalways wet!

I miss having a sink. But I guess this is an interesting way of doing things.

Anyways. See you till the next post. (JOEY YOU BETTER BE READING THIS! I am mostly doing this for youuuuuuu! (^-^))

ALL-nim