We're here!

We have arrived!

Let me tell you a little about our trip over here…

We left Nashville on Thursday evening with 4 50lb suitcases and some heavy carry-ons.  We landed in LA at 11:30pm central time and waited until 2:30am to board our Asiana flight headed to South Korea.  (On a side note, we’re trying to figure out the water here.  We took cold showers yesterday because there was no hot water.  We have since heard from a fellow American teacher that we need to let it run for as long as 10 minutes so I am listening to water as I write this J) Anywho, it was interesting because we were already feeling some culture shock just waiting for our flight in LA.  I’d say 95% of the passengers were South Korean so the chatter around us was unrecognizable.  We have both traveled a decent amount, but this is the first time we are not able to understand a single word anyone is saying.  We’ve learned a couple words: Come-sa-knee-da (phonetic spelling) means thank you and juseo means please.  That’s about all we have so far! (The water is finally hot for Luke’s shower, thank the Lord!)

The flight from LA was uneventful. We slept a lot, watched a few movies and ate meals at the oddest hours.  We had 3 seats between the two of us so we were kind of able to lie down.  We landed at 7:30am Korean time on Saturday morning; a 14 hour flight with a 15 hour time difference.  Customs was super quick.  We grabbed our luggage from baggage claim and met Brenda and Spike outside.  Koreans working with Westerners pick new names so we have met thus far: Brenda, Spike, William, Henry, Rosa and Michael.  Maybe we’ll come home with Korean names! 

Driving through Seoul on our way from the airport was different from what we had expected.  The sheer number of apartment buildings was unreal.  They’d have about 100 of the same tall buildings, no exaggeration, lined up next to one another with maybe 300 units in each.  Now we know where the millions of people in Seoul reside!  Then across the highway, there would be a similar grouping.  The city was less modern than we had pictured, and a little dirtier than we had expected.  Nice cars though-the desired colors seem to be black, white and silver.  The old and new buildings side by side present an interesting twist and I’m excited to see more of that as we explore the country. 

We took a quick grocery shopping trip at Emart for some essentials, ate lunch with the English teachers at a museum and we were off to Jincheon.  We live on the 4^th floor of the school so we looked in the classroom windows yesterday and it seems like it will be a fun teaching experience.  It’s an intensive English camp, so we will have hundreds of students coming through our school.  It’s a little different than we had expected, but we’re told we get to play a lot of games and sing songs with the kids so maybe it’ll be nice to be a little more flexible with our lessons.  Our apartment is bigger than we had thought.  We have two bathrooms, a queen size bed (which is more like a queen size piece of plywood), a small kitchen, 2 porches, 2 huge desks and heating that comes out of the ceiling.  We are quickly learning that Koreans like everything at one temperature, HOT. All the sweaters we packed may have been a mistake!  Something fun is we get to wear “slippers” to class, slip-on shoes like TOMS or flats.  We walked around the grounds yesterday.  The mountains are beautiful.  It’s so quiet out here, and we’re excited to try out some hiking.  The nearest city is a 35-minute walk so we are quite isolated.  A nice change from the heavily trafficked Seoul we saw on Saturday!

It’s Monday morning at 7:00am here and Sunday afternoon at 4:00pm in the States.  We have orientation today and a medical check-up tomorrow.  I should go see if I can get a warm shower too!  Miss you already.