The Official Week One Post

It is hard to believe that it has been a week since I have left Canada and arrived in South Korea. During this time I have experienced many new things....

1) A super long flight.

I can't complain really. I took one direct flight from Toronto to Seoul, which took 14 hours, and then another short flight from Seoul to Daegu. After hearing a few flight horror stories from some of my co-workers I now feel like I had it pretty easy. I was excited at the fact that even on the Air Canada flight we were given chopsticks with every meal. I guess it gives the foreigners time to practice.

2) Unwanted roomates.

Throughout my University career I have been very lucky to have some awesome roomates. Coming to Korea I thought that my days of sharing houses/apartments with roomates were over. And they were - until I ran into my unwanted roomates on the second night. Yes, that's right, I found cockroaches. I guess my apartment had been empty for over a month and some cockroaches decided they would move in. The first night was the worst as the thought of cockroaches running around my place kept me awake. It has now been a few days since I have seen any - I hope they decided to move out - but I have taken some preventative chemical action just in case.

3) Being a 'waygook'

As you've probably guessed, waygook is the Korean word/slang term for foreigner. I think that me and the other English teachers at my school are the only foreigners in our area. My most memorable experience so far is being at EMart (kindof like walmart but bigger) and having a little kid point at me while tugging on his mother's jacket and saying I don't know what. I guess it doesn't help being semi-blonde. All I can say is that sometimes you feel like you're at a zoo, and you are one of the animals.

4) Soju

I had my first soju experience over the weekend at a place called Festival. Festival is a Korean restaurant right in the heart of downtown Daegu. We arrived at the place well after midnight, and were presented with many side dishes of food upon ordering one pitcher of kiwi soju. So we sat around the table drinking soju and eating kimchi, corn, pickled radish and a weird desert that mixes ice, red beans and different sweet sauces. We liked the soju so much that we returned to Festival on Tuesday night hoping to try a different flavour - peach. Since the menu is in Korean, we didn't really know if they even served peach soju, but we tried to get our point across to the server. I guess we didn't do a very good job because we were presented with grape. Next time we will have to learn the Korean word for peach before we go out.

So that's it for now. I hope everyone is doing well back home. I miss Canada, but so far I think that Korea is going to be a pretty amazing place too.

Geon-bae (Cheers!)