Korea: An Introduction

To my friends,

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, holy crap, I'm in Korea!

Sincerely,

Hal

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Ok...now that that is out of the way.

It is Sunday morning here, I've been in the country for about 3 days, and I'm finally getting around to making a blog. To those of you who've asked how I am, sorry for the delay. Instead of writing everyone an email, I wanted to wait until I had a moment to create a blog that could answer everyone's questions at once. So here we go, my experience thus far.

I arrived in Korea at 5:40pm on the 21st, and was picked up by one of the employee's of Korea Nazarene University (KNU), Tenny. Here he is (he wouldn't turn to look at me because he said it would be dangerous, if that tells you anything about Tenny):

Although he is a little overly-cautious, Tenny is a great guy and has been my chauffeur all over the place, and answered tons and tons of questions from me (you can imagine how much I might talk if I didn't know anything about a place ;) ). In hopes of slightly repaying him, I told him I would ride with him the next day to pick up two of the girls that are in our program, which he was thankful for (it is a 3 hour drive from Incheon Airport to Cheonan, where KNU is). I have to admit that I wasn't being completely altruistic, you see there was this..um...sculpture that I thought was pretty funny when we drove past it on my first trip from Incheon, but I wasn't quick enough to grab my camera. So, I wanted to go back and get that picture. Let me preface by saying that my mind almost instantly went bad with this, and...oh...well, I'll just show the "art" the Koreans choose to introduce their country with.

Ya ya, I know, pretty bad, but I just couldn't stop laughing. Other than this mishap, the Koreans tend to be quite tasteful in their artwork, dress, and other creative areas. I just don't know what they were thinking here.

Other than drive and around and pick up new people, all I've really done is tried to get my room together, and get to know the city around the campus. Here are a few pictures of Cheonan that I think give a good feel for it.

Cheonan is considered a medium-small size city here, with it's paltry 500,000 residents. Everywhere in Korea they build up instead of out, and you can see that they use all that space for signs. Lots of flashy colors, neon, and funny animals overjoyed for you to eat them (like happy Mr. Squid there!). The other picture with the rows of packaged food was a sweets shop, so those are all different kinds of cakes, sweetbean-stuffed rice patties, and other various Asian treats. Speaking of food, so far I have been incredibly happy with every meal here. Most (including breakfast) consist of some rice/noodles, veggies, and a little meat, all very spicy. Here is a picture of the chicken and noodles we had when a group of the American professors took us out on the town.

It was great, though most meat here is still on the bone, and learning to use nothing but chopsticks to remove meat from a drumstick is a skill I hope comes quickly. The orange/red cubed stuff there is a "pickled" radish called Dikon, I say "pickled" b/c that isn't what they really do to it, I just don't know what they do and that's kinda what it tastes like. Kimchi is the same way, they ferment the stuff in pots buried underground for weeks, but it just tastes like it was soaked in vinegar. And before anyone asks, yes, they do eat dog here, and I told myself I would only try it if a Korean offered it to me (wouldn't want to offend them). Well, at the grocery store last night, this little old man giving out free samples saw me and did just that. Don't judge.

Once outside I was walking to the crosswalk when a group of 4 middle school girls stopped me and starting giggling. They would smile and say. "hellooooooo" really loud, then one got the courage to come shake my hand. Once they had their fun I walked on to a street vendor who was selling...something...and it smelled really good. Since I didn't know what it was, and the guy didn't speak English, I waved for those girls to come over and translate for me. After explaining to them what I was doing in Korea and why I needed their help, they told me it was a sweet cake with more of the red-bean stuff inside. It was only 2000 won, so I bought some, and made up for my sinful eating inside the store by buying each of the girls a bag as well. They flipped out and starting yelling, "thank you teacher! thank you thank you, American teacher so nice!", and then I had the attention of everyone on that corner (which here is a lot of people). One older lady asked me, "you rich?", to which I just laughed and said no. After my brush with fame, I walked home and feel asleep around 8pm, I think jet lag is still affecting me.

That's it for now, I will write again in few days once I have some more exciting pictures to show. Love you all.