Travel and New Friend

Hello again everyone!

These past couple of days have been pretty busy. Since I work at the main branch of DYB in Daechi, first time teachers come to our branch to watch classes. This saturday a girl named Emily from Bristol area who speaks proper Queen's English was watching some of our classes (not mine obviously since I'm not yet the best example of how to lead a classroom). Anyway, she's very cheery and always wants to go exploring, so I tag along. On Saturday, I was finally moved from my old room in Bundang to my new room in Daechong. I am now only a 5 minute metro ride away from school, which is great! Here are some photos of my new view..

This one is a view from the elevator. its a giant sports/walking/exercise complex. Haven't been there yet.

My new apartment is gigantic compared to my old one. I'll post pictures as soon as I make it a proper apartment. Some pluses are that I now have a tv and cable, and an actual bed. The downside is the bathroom is tiny and the mattress is probably no better than the giant rock that is in the jungle between our house and Mujie's house.

So, I moved saturday night. I was there for a total of 10 minutes when Emily invited me out to eat with one of her friends from England that is teaching here for his second year. We went to another barbeque place and ordered boatloads of food. We also drank soju, the national drink of Korea, which is absolutely disgusting. I don't know how people love it here. It tastes like watered down Vodka, and I think it actually is. It is only 20% alcohol. Something that tastes that bad should not be that low on alcohol. It's like drinking Vodka but with half the punch. If something is going to make me gag going down it better knock me over after a few. It is really cheap though, like a dollar a bottle. And people drink 2 to 3 bottles a night to themselves. Either tonight or tomorrow some guy named Joon from California or somewhere is going to take me out to drink Soju in "real Korean style". 

So we went out with Emily's friend for drinks and food. We went back to his apartment after and met his roommates. He lives with another Englishman and 2 Irishmen. They tried to get us to go to Itaewon, which is where all the foreign teachers hang out on the weekends for drinks. But we were both tired and just went home.

The next day Emily and I explored the city and went shopping. We took the metro to a place called Namdaemun. 

This is a typical metro car. The cars are very clean. People in Korea are addicted to electronics, and blame it on stress from too much school (which is true, they go to more school than you can even imagine). Anyway, there are tvs on everything. I have tv on my phone, but don't feel like paying for it. People play games and watch tv everywhere they go. On thing we've been talking about at school is computer game addiction in Korea. Some examples..

1. 2 parents were charged with murder of a child after they let their newborn baby die from lack of nutrition because they were busy nurturing their "virtual baby"

2. A 22 year old guy killed his mother after she told him he was playing too much video games.

3. An older man died from starvation after playing this one computer game for 50 hours straight.

Unbelievable? All of these events happened in recent times.

This is Namdaemun. We went on a Sunday, which we quickly found out was the wrong time to go. This place is teeming with people in all the streets. They have a bunch of stores though like Forever 21, Zara, H&M, everything. We got some street food here too, like chicken kebabs or something. They were delicious. We needed a short break so we went to The Coffee Bean. Emily ordered an orange juice and a water, and found out that no one here understands the English accent. She has to train to speak more like an American, although I am training to sound convincingly British. Anyway, she pronounces "water" like "wartuh". The girl behind the counter kept saying What? What? and I finally stepped in, pronouncing "water" with my eloquent Western Pennsylvania monotone and she said "ohhhhhhhh"

This is Emily taking a picture of something else. One of her students asked her "Teacher, why is your hair yellow?"

We had plans later that evening on meeting the British man from my school, Benjamin, for dinner, so we decided to stay out until then instead of going home and going back out. We walked around and saw all the shops. Emily spotted a Louis Vuitton store so we made our way to it. En route we saw a glasses shop. I quickly found that glasses shops in America are scams. The glasses here are sooo cheap and they make them so fast! There was an older teenager running the shop and he spoke good enough English to properly explain everything we needed to know. I picked out some frames for $20, and the lenses were another $20. So in total I spent $40, with no need for a yearly eye exam or insurance or anything like that. He simply took the glasses I was wearing, cleaned them, fixed them (because I have done some damage to them over the years), and put them in a machine. In 2 minutes, just from looking at my glasses, he had my prescription! It was great. Emily got a pair of yellow frames for the same price. It took him 1 hour to make both of our glasses, instead of the 2 weeks it takes at home. After the hour wait we came back and picked our glasses up. We asked him how he spoke English so well, and he got really shy and said "oh no, my English not good". They all say that, and I tell them "your English is better than my Korean" he sort of laughed and pulled out a book from behind the counter. He has been spending his time learning English by reading Aesop's Fables. 

I found this great store too by the glasses shop. 

We continued to pass the time by browsing in stores. Emily wanted to buy her boyfriend a tie, so we went to Lotte Department store, which is like a Bloomingdales maybe? It's pretty upscale and we couldn't find anything reasonable. Either way, there are like thousands of workers and if you even look at an item they flock to you and start speaking Korean and pointing at things and matching them with things. Its totally overwhelming and both of us felt uncomfortable so we didn't stay long. Having Koreans in your face trying to sell you things that you don't understand is a frightening experience. 

We caught the metro to meet Ben at a place called Gangnam. On the metro, I spotted a kid doing the most stereotypical asian thing you could imagine. He was playing with a Rubix Cube. And when I say playing with one I really mean mastering one. This kid was flying through this thing. He was spinning it, spinning rows, turning corners, everything. Faster than I could have done even if I didn't even know what I was doing. It was incredible. 

We had 45 minutes to kill so we went to the dollar store called Daiso. Its the greatest store! They have really neat things for really cheap. We sat in the massage section for a good 20 minutes laughing and playing with all the quirky massagers asians think of. One in particular was a strawberry shoulder massager.

It is literally a plastic strawberry on a stick and you simply smack your shoulder with it. 

We found Ben and went to a Japanese style restaurant. The ambience was really cool but the food wasn't anything special. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't something to come back for. 

Yesterday morning we headed for our mandatory health check to file for our Alien Residency Card. Before we left I noticed that I had to bring a passport sized photo with me. We stopped at the ID Photo booth in our metro station so I could get some. I put in the money, took the picture, and pressed what I thought meant print the picture, although there was no English. We waited and waited for the pictures to print out. Emily put her ear to the machine and said it wasn't making a noise, so we gave up. We left the machine with my mugshot still on the screen (for passport photos you aren't allowed to smile anymore, so every picture looks like you are ready to prowl on something). Keep in mind that this was 9am.. This will be important later. I went to a different ID station along the way and the picture machine worked this time.

We read the map directions wrong and got lost. We eventually gave up, got some breakfast, and killed some time at the Coex mall. There is a huge aquarium there, but we didn't have time to go in, and it was pretty expensive. We went to the bookstore and got some books. When the time came, we went to school. After school, we went to Pizza School, which sells like $5-6 dollar pizzas. The first time I got the sweet potato pizza, this time I got the regular potato pizza. It sounds strange, but it was pretty good. Anyway, so we finally got back to our building by 1030 at night. While we were getting off the metro, I decided to see if my pictures ever printed out. The box was empty and, you guessed it, this was still on the screen...